I am the worst comedy movie critic you’ll ever meet — ask my wife, Leah. These days most comedies are about high school sex or marital infidelity. I usually get up from the couch or walk out of the theater in the first 20 minutes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not prudish; I just think common culture is, well, so common and low class these days.

But as a sales guy, the movie, “The Internship” teaches us a valuable lesson about what makes the “Sales Personality Style” critical.  And, given that Google had a hand in the movie it shows even the great and mighty Google is fairly clueless about what makes salespeople critical in growing sales.

The plot of the movie is that two sales guys get blown out when their company closes down. In the course of figuring out their next move, the character played by Vince Vaughn has an insight that he wants to go work at Google. This is an important characteristic of the Sales Personality Style.

The Sales Personality Style has the ability to comfortably imagine far-fetched scenarios. This is not to be overlooked when you go about staffing your sales team — and is the first and foremost reason why you need to make sure you’re only bringing Sales Personality Styles in to be interviewed.

When they are interviewed it is by video. This is a concept we’ve encouraged our clients to implement.  Interviewing by video is simple these days. As a Founder and CEO I work with software developers. Given the size of our company — and since most developers are located remotely from my two offices in Norfolk or Nahariya, I use video interviews.

Video interviews are efficient and can give you 90% of what an in-person interview gives. Today with Google Hangouts or Skype you can get more done in less time. Perhaps for the last interview you’ll want to make it face to face.

In the movie, where the two 50 something sales guys are in way over their head in Google’s core business, which is coding and developing software, they shine when it comes to people. Salespeople, as it turns out, even at the great and mighty $48 Billion a year Google are invaluable when it comes down to what makes Google great — revenue generation.

Yesterday, right before the start of business, the Advanced Hiring System website went down.  I found out because a client emailed me. I immediately IM’ed our Manager of Web Technology. He’s in India and within 15 minutes the site was back and running.

Today I went to our Advanced Hiring System Youtube account https://www.youtube.com/user/afendrich to upload the latest edition of the How to Hire a Salesperson E-course. But our channel looked like this. Have you ever tried to get technical support from Google???

The latest government job report sounds ominous. Just 74,000 new jobs created in December – missing by a mile the projected 196,000. Ouch. Future job growth (other than registered nurses), will be for jobs at Walmart and the like.

With the lousy jobs report, you’d think that it would be easy to hire sales talent.

Unfortunately hiring for sales talent has become more difficult. Advanced Hiring System clients continue to report a tight job market all across the country for real salespeople.

Regular readers of this blog know that real sales talent is rarer than finding an honest man or woman in Congress.

In fact, our data shows only one in every 33 Americans is what we call a “natural” to become a top performing salesperson.

The rarity of those who have the personality to be good salespeople is why most salespeople hired end up failing. Most sales hiring strategies simply fail to look at personality style, instead looking at previous sales experience as primary criteria.

Traditional sales trainers attempt to take the untalented and teach them to sell – like putting lipstick on a pig we think.

One strategy Advanced Hiring System clients use it to constantly be recruiting in their markets. You don’t need to waste time on sales applicants until you’ve found their profile matches the rare personality qualities that make for a great salesperson.

Bottom line is to always have the “Welcome Mat” out for top sellers who are Money-motivated Persuaders. Finding them takes time, but when you find them they are worth their weight in gold.