If you’re like most hiring managers, you may have made the mistake in the past of hiring a sales person because you had too few candidates, and as a result of that, you “wished” and “hoped: that the candidate that you did have would turn out to be a great sales performer. We all know that when we wish and hope that someone is going to turn out to be a superstar, this often comes back to bite us. I’ve experienced this in the past, and I know a lot of other sales managers and vice-president’s of sales who have experienced this in the past as well.
One of the key things that we absolutely have to do when we have too few candidates is to be doubly rigorous about the process that we put our few candidates through, in order to make sure that they’re fully vetted. This means adding more people to the interviewing team and pushing back on our own natural tendency to want to justify a hiring decision by scrutinizing and playing devils advocate with ourselves regarding the candidates skills, abilities, experience, domain knowledge, and their actual sales achievement history.
Oftentimes the best way to do this is when you only have one or two candidates for a position, step back from the process and let it rest for a while. Don’t make an immediate or hasty decision. Why should you hesitate? What happens if you lose the one candidate that you have? The fact is that by stepping back from a decision for a little while, often times it will allow you to gain the clarity needed to make the right decision.
What’s the alternative? Making a hasty decision and wishing and hoping that a candidate is going to work out will often lead to huge expense, many months of lost time, and tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales. The best way to avoid making a mis-hire is to make sure that you don’t make a decision if you think there’s a chance of a mis-hire. If a candidate goes through your interviewing process and your conclusion is “maybe,” then you should conclude that the hiring decision needs to be “no.”
If you are a hiring manager who’s been wishing and hoping that that one candidate that you have for a sales position turns out to be the right person, make sure to eliminate wishful thinking by following these easy steps:
recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing
Labels: career, recruiting