Subject: October Hire Score Newsletter

Welcome to the October edition of the Hire Score Newsletter. For those of you new to the newsletter, this is the 46th edition. For those of you that have been with me all this time, thanks for coming along.

I sure created a buzz last month with the unveiling of the new sales management system. I wanted to thank all of you who responded to my questions about the new material. At the end of this newsletter I will review some of the material and let you know about some exciting new opportunities to put the material to use.

But first, I want to discuss a much needed subject -- discrimination. Now for those of you that are about to tune out thinking I am going to get into a bunch of legal do's and don't's, hold on because that is not what this discussion is about.

The idea for this column came from an article I read last week in the USA Today newspaper. It discussed how people in their 20's and early 30's are being discriminated against in this tight employment market. It went on to say that companies are hiring people with 10-20 years of experience for the same money and don't need to hire people with 5-10 years of experience.

Just to check the validity of the premise I mentioned this to a group of HR professionals at a recent Human Resources conference. The general feeling was that "yes" this is the case. And although, on the surface, this seems to make sense, I, your noble column writer am here to show you why this does not make sense.

This philosophy of hiring assumes that people with more experience are better than people with less experience. Sometimes true and sometimes not. This a pre-conceived notion and any pre-conceived notion is at the heart of all discrimination.

We all have these pre-conceived notions and I'm telling you that when it comes to hiring they can get you in trouble. Some of these pre-conceive notions are illegal (men make better engineers than women) and some are just plain not true (people with 10 years of experience are more valuable than people with 5).

The way to combat your pre-conceived notions is to understand the fundamental driving force behind my Strategic Staffing model. "You hire to satisfy business needs" No where in that statement does it mention age, race, gender religion or any other non-performance factor. Your goal in hiring has to be to hire a person that you are convinced will satisfy the business need best. In English, the purpose of your hiring must be to satisfy business needs.

Using this principle-focused approach, your hiring decision should be based solely on factors that predict success on the job like knowledge, skills and behaviors. For those of you that have been through our Selecting Winners workshop, you know this concept is the primary building block of our performance-based success profile.

So going back to the premise of the article, you should hire people with more experience instead of people with less. You can see that this is the wrong premise. You should hire the person who has the highest probability of successfully satisfying your business need. Sometimes that is the person with the most experience, but sometimes it is not

Why would you have any pre-conceived notion other than, "I want to hire the person who will best satisfy my business need". You can apply this to just about any discrimination situation and you will see (forget the legal ramification) how it is bad business to discriminate.

Now for a couple of quick announcements. Many of you have asked for information about public sessions of my Selecting Winners workshop. This is not something we do on a regular basis. But, a situation has come up that I want to share with you. We will be conducting public session next week October 22, 2003 in Sacramento CA, Sorry for the short notice but this is a recent development. We have just a few spots left open for this session. If you are interested in experiencing my Selecting Winners model firsthand, getting the information you need to put all of my principles into action then here is you chance. Just visit the following website and download your registration form.

www.selectingwinners.com/registration.html

Hope to see you there!

The next announcement has to do with this newsletter. As I mentioned a few months ago, I am having a very difficult time getting through many of your e-mail systems. This is a problem even though every one of you requested to receive this newsletter. With the proliferation of spam and spam filters, it makes it more and more challenging to get this newsletter to you. There are a couple of options. Option number 1 is to have everyone re-subscribe for the newsletter using a different system. Option 2 is I can go to a web-based newsletter where you would only receive a 1-line e-mail that the newsletter is now available and you then log on to a website to read it. The final option is to eliminate the e-mail version and go to a hard-copy version. This final option unfortunately would force me to end the "totally-free" nature of the newsletter.

I have not decided which is the best option. Each has positives and negatives. But I need to make a decision by the end of the year. I am losing too many loyal subscribers due to the problems associated with e-mail. If you have an opinion on the subject, shoot me an e-mail at staff@selectingwinners.com. Thanks!

Finally, last month I shared with you a new system I have developed for managing the staffing levels and sales targets for your sales organization. Once again, I wanted to thank all of you that responded to my questions last month. A lot has happened in the last 30 days with the system. We have filled in many of the blanks, tested and retested the principles and have put together an agenda for the rollout boot camp. Yes I said boot camp.

We have decided that the best way to immerse yourself in the material is to spend 2 days working hands-on with the experts so you walk away with a working system. We have named the system "The 4 X 12 Sales Balancing System, The Sales Executives Complete Guide to Setting and Achieving Sales Staffing Levels and Sales Targets". We chose this name because there are 4 steps from sales targets to staffing levels and four steps from staffing levels to sales targets. And, there are 12 pressure points that you can affect to impact both numbers.

We will be conducting a two day boot camp in mid December for a select group. We have put together an amazing faculty of experts in sales methodology, sales planning, opportunity management and of course hiring to lead the sessions. I will get specific information about this boot camp to you soon but if you want to guarantee a spot send me a note to staff@selectingwinners.com I have to admit this is the single most exciting breakthrough I have been involved with in more than 30 years in the business. I am talking about quantum improvesments to your sales results.

That's it for this month. As always, if you have comments or questions, send e-mail to staff@selectingwinners.com.

Have a great month recruiting!

Barry Shamis