Getting the right person in the right job gets a big thumbs up from me, but there are 3 factors that are simple to implement but have a huge impact on retention, as well as being more effective in recruitment.

First have the right hiring process. One that front ends a good onboard process. The right hiring process can be found at http://snipurl.com/10p98s.

Second use an high accuracy online evaluation like the OMG sales evaluation (95% predictive validity),or a skills/competency test.

Third Onboard well, and start on the day you have the acceptance letter, confirm personal details, get the bank account for payment and any government stuff, set up the email address and cell phone. Put it on business cards and get them to check the proofs.Get the training started before they start.

Sell your brand, sell your brand, sell your brand. And buy their loyalty. Hire behaviour and competence, train domain and skills

Enjoy the longevity

As part of the trend to reduce the costs of hiring many companies are turning to testing and assessment to validate their hiring decisions. Most prominent amongst these – maybe because they have been around so long – are DiSC and Myers Briggs (MBTI) based personality tests. Both are based on using paired adjective choices to determine personality traits. Neither of these are job specific, but they have been shoehorned into all sorts of versions to try and measure beliefs about what different jobs require.

It’s a bit like using a panel van to take the family to the movies and carry 20 tons of steel. Both tasks need a vehicle – the family need 4 seats and some comfort, a small turning circle and a heater. The steel needs an articulated truck. The only real similarity is they are vehicles Some Background DISC development began in the early 1900s when the US Army asked psychologist William Marston to investigate why different soldiers who received the same training behaved differently. He took 10 years to produce a report “Emotions of Normal People.”

Soon after publication an unknown psychologist used the theory of mental energy that Marston developed and produced an easy to administer pencil-and-paper test based on pairs of adjectives which were added together to produce scores for dominance, extraversion, need for security, and need for structure. Nothing about job behaviour anywhere and certainly nothing claimed as predictive of any behaviour – let alone job performance.

Still “When the only tool you know how to use is hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” That is, to many uninformed DISC users, every hiring problem looked like a DISC profile. And this hammer has been used on many nails – even one using devoutness as a measure !

MBTI is based on Carl Jung’s theories about psychological type preferences. Jung’s book “Psychological Types,” Myers and Briggs developed the tests and tested their work on friends and family during the 1940s in an attempt to resolve conflicts and help match people and work. MBTI classifies individuals along four dimensions according to how they seem to see the world

1. Energy; Extravert (likes to interact) / Introvert (prefers to concentrate)

2. Attention; Sensing – Focuses on Facts- Practical and methodical/Intuitive Focuses on possibilities, theoretical and leaps forward

3. Decision-Making; Thinking (T): Makes decisions believes in justice Feeling (F): Makes decisions based on desire for harmony. Believes in compassion.

4. Lifestyle; Judging (J): Proceeds towards goals in an organized way. plans and comes to decisions. Perceiving (P): Spontaneous. Likes to gather information and keep options open.

But, at the end of the day MBTI is a clinical tool that requires trained experts to interpret and make judgements. This is just too labour intensive, too clunky. It is also difficult to relate MBTI to a valid, predictive job performance

At the end of the day scores on personality tests are just not highly predictive of performance. As a simple example The drunk at the bar lurches from extraversion as his inhibitions disappear, but lurches into introverted concentration as he pours more booze into his system, probably past a little bit of dominance It’s all too fluffy …. It is bad science to pretend that either of these tests accurately predict managerial performance, or anything else especially sales performance

But hey quasi science is better than no science isn’t it?

As for us. We don’t pretend to know what works for Accountants, Architects or anything up to and including Zoologists. Except stopping at S we do know what works for Salespeople and Sales managers.

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The graph below (from CIPD I believe) indicates the relative accuracy of evaluation methods. I’m grateful to Sally Duff for challenging what I was saying about this. I imagine that we may continue to disagree about the sequence for pre hiring evaluation . She favours interview, evaluation, interview, I favour Evaluation interview, interview as this removes the fact that the interviewer has and will deploy their own prejudices. There is a place for interview, of course, but I believe that much of this is to do with personal fit

hiring-efficiencypptx

I’ve been discussing how a strategic approach to sales may involve standing still for a while in order to create solid future growth. In order to achieve that the strategy must contained two defined processes.
First and foremost a sales process that enables everyone to sing off the same song sheet (I discuss that at http://wp.me/pWNjL-5 ).
Secondly a process for hiring salespeople that achieves more than 25% success rate which is an industry standard
For as long as I can remember we have adopted a system for hiring salespeople dependent on gut feel and a labour intensive process of CV 2 interviews and a presentation (CV2IP). Then we wonder why we can’t get and keep New Business sales people. In fact the standard is that only 20% of sales hires are effective and failed hires are often the biggest single cost in any sales department.
Psychometric tests almost double this figure, but the number of times I have been told – “Oh you need to do this – just to prove you aren’t an axe murderer” . Sorry I’m not a moron or a child either.

So the evidence (and all business decisions are based on that – aren’t they ?) is that traditional hiring methods don’t work. But, what does.
We are developing Perfect Hire to follow an effective process. Perfect Hire uses data from hundreds of thousands of succesful sales hires to guarantee success. And it is simple, time efficient and easy.

1. Source in the normal way
2. Evaluate using an online evaluation (the one we use is expensive but 95% effective)
3. 5 minute phone interview
4. Read the CV
5. Face to face interview
6. Decide
7. Hire
8. Structured Onboarding

But you can only use this if you want a successful salesforce.