Last month in my article, “Hiring is Hard. How Will You Get It Right?” I shared six tips for hiring the right people the first time. Let’s take a deeper look at how you can put them into practice for yourself.
Plan your interview questions in advance and be direct – Interview time is precious. Consider your hiring criteria as well as questions you have about your candidate’s background, accomplishments or gaps in a resume and prepare a written list of behavioral questions to ask. Behavioral questions pose real-world situations you can use to evaluate if the candidate would handle the situation the way you or a top performing team member would. A sample question for a sales person might be, “Give me an example of a large sales opportunity you developed for many months and was forecasted to close in the next quarter, that was suddenly at risk due to unforeseen circumstances, then what you did to avoid losing the opportunity?” With questions like these, you’ll get a more gut level feel for whether the candidate’s capabilities align with your needs.
Don’t let them “sell you” – while you are evaluating their sales capabilities and suitability. Of course, you are seeking a candidate who can truly sell, but you want to evaluate the capability and character behind the pitch. A CEO I worked for once asked a candidate to sell him his pen – an old-fashioned and ineffective tactic. Most sales candidates would be able to ask the basic sales questions such as budget, customer needs, describing the features of the pen and asking for the order. More importantly, you are seeking the skills needed in enterprise and complex selling situations such as critical thinking, business acumen, and communication skills. How will you evaluate if the candidate has the grit to overcome objections and rejection to get to “yes” for a meeting or for a deal, day in and day out, particularly in a competitive market or when selling a new product? Does your candidate have the ability to go it alone and succeed in selling in a dispersed territory and a difficult market? How can you uncover when a candidate may be misrepresenting their work ethic and past success? It’s not easy, but these success attributes are those you want to identify with as much certainty as you can.
Be aware of your natural biases – Do you naturally like a candidate because they are charismatic, came from your university, your home town or you have friends or colleagues in common? Likability doesn’t mean you’ll have an effective sales person. Stick to the topic at hand: the fit for the job. Do they use a formal sales methodology? If so, ask how they apply it and to describe a situation where it has and has not worked for them. I have found that most sales people do not consistently apply a rigorous methodology so drilling into the answer will provide you with specifics you can use to make an assessment. One bad hire, let’s call him Karl, was well dressed and looked and acted maturely. He had all of the right answers. One reference even said that Karl would be “the best person we would ever hire.” Karl was excellent at telling the hiring team collectively what we wanted to hear. We felt he was a good cultural fit: he worked for a strong competitor and he had all the right answers about industry contacts and past successes. It became quickly apparent four months after Karl joined the team that he was entirely ineffective at obtaining customer meetings and had lied blatantly about prospecting and sales activity. He did not exhibit the desire or ability to work in a challenging, start-up market. He misrepresented his work ethic in interviews but we heard what we wanted to hear and ignored the signals we could have seen and questioned. The hire was easy and convenient and blinded us.
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Making the reference process matter – References are an important part of the due diligence process and must be done but are often only moderately useful. So often references are one buddy doing another a favor or someone just being nice and helping a former employee. I’ve learned that details matter. Listen to the questioning voice in your head if something isn’t right: identify areas of uncertainty about a candidate and ask clarifying questions to understand. Don’t accept an answer or a reference if you aren’t satisfied. What really caused that person to have three one-year stints in a row? Why is the resume missing sales performance information? Regardless of job title, what was the actual work done in each role? You can learn a great deal from a former manager’s experience– was the candidate one of the most valued team members and specifically why? Ask the questions about challenges you know the new hire will face in the job as well as areas where you’ve seen others struggle. If the candidate was valuable to a former manager for the same reasons, they will likely be a good team member for you.
Back channel references, in which you obtain feedback through your network about the candidate without the candidate being aware of the discussion, can be very valuable. In one such situation, a candidate I’ll call Kelly, cited a sales situation example that involved a customer I had known for years. I phoned the customer independently to request a back-channel reference for Kelly. The customer’s comment was “I’ve got no problem with Kelly.” That statement was hardly a ringing endorsement. Ultimately Kelly was hired because several of the hiring team felt she was a good cultural fit. Kelly didn’t deliver the results expected commensurate with her seniority or salary. In retrospect, I believe I should have paid closer attention to the customer’s statement and asked for specifics behind it. Sometimes we are too polite internally and externally and in too much of a hurry to fill a position when it does not serve us.
Implement a 90-day plan – Even with extensive experience and a solid methodology, hiring the right person every time is not possible. To mitigate, ask the new team member to create a 90-day plan based on an outline and goals you provide. Schedule a review of progress to plan three weeks after they’ve been hired. Schedule regular check-ins against the plan every two- weeks. This can be part of a weekly 1-1 meeting or separate. Put the meetings on the calendar in advance and honor them. It’s so easy for these to get lost in a busy schedule but, if the new salesperson needs help, resources, or is falling behind, you’ll be able to offer support and have a record of progress and activity so you can course correct quickly if need be.
