Welcome back to the Advanced Hiring System E-course.
We call this section “How to Never Get Trick by Resumes (or LinkedIn profiles) Again.”
A long time ago in the 1950’s my father was National Sales Manager for Revlon. What did my father do to hire a salesperson?
Get a bunch of resumes
Look for previous sales experience
Even better, industry sales experience
Interview those applicants and hire the one who interviewed the best
This simply doesn’t work anymore. Things are a heck of a lot more competitive.
And applicants are bigger liars on their resumes.
You can’t start with resumes anymore. It’s hard to break that habit but resumes are nearly USELESS.
How do we know that resumes are useless as the selecton strategy for sales?
Online job search company Monster.com’s Chairman Jeff Taylor claimed an “executive MBA/OPM” from Harvard Business School… But the school does not have such a degree
Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson listed a computer science degree but he didn’t have one
Sandra Baldwin, the President of the U.S. Olympic Committee resigned after she lied about her education and admitted she never graduated.
Marilee Jones, Dean of Admissions at MIT, claimed to have degrees from Albany Medical College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Union College. She had received none of them.
George O’Leary resigned as Notre Dame Football coach just days after his hiring after he admitted to lying about a master’s degree in education and a claim that he had played college football for several years. An investigation revealed that O’Leary had made those things up.
Even if it’s not totally full of lies the truth-stretching on resumes is so ridiculous you can’t base decisions on them.
Stop selecting by resumes. It is a big step to realize that your best applicant probably doesn’t have the best resume.
And while we’re on the subject of how not to select… you can’t raid the competitors.
Why not raid your competitors?
Because you’re not going to get their top performers, you’re going to get their second stringers. Their second stringer is never going to become a top performer for you!
Are you ready to hear that?
Sales Hiring rules changed with the dawn of the Internet. It happened with the ease with which applicants could apply for jobs. Today things are dramatically different.
Applicants apply at the click of a button. They have their resumes tweaked to catch the attention of the poor sales managers who are still selecting applicants by resumes.
In the next section of the How to Hire Salespeople Who Can Really Sell E-course I will show you the best strategy to find applicants who can really sell.
Stay tuned. Your company can build a sales hiring system that gets you the best salespeople.
