This statement below I came across recently brought a smile to my face as it reminded me of this.

Can you perform under pressure? asked the recruiter. 

No, said the candidate, but I do a mean Bohemian Rhapsody!

Some more standard features you might see employers looking for in hiring an ideal candidate are:  

• Ambitious
• Resilient 
• Bubbly personality or Can-do attitude
• Clear thinker and have a Strong work ethic 
• Share our passion
• Accuracy and Attention to detail
• a Team player, a Strong Leader, and yes, Perform Under Pressure!

As an illustration, the typical wish list for the “perfect employee” often reads something like this:

“We are looking for someone ambitious who will demonstrate initiative and resilience has the maturity always to remain calm and professional. You will have an excellent work ethic and have outstanding communication skills. 

You are respectful and enjoy working in a team in a fast-paced environment in which you will be able to prioritise and handle multiple tasks while meeting deadlines”.

Job advertisements will also include what the work involves, and the qualifications and experience needed to be a successful applicant.

Consider the total recruitment cost of hiring a non-ideal candidate

Despite rigorous selection processes, many studies tell us that up to 50% of new hires fail within 18 months.

For Australian businesses, the cost of these failures is indeed high. Recent research discovered the direct recruitment costs to hire ONE employee are on average a staggering $19,000! 

Add to that another 30% to 50% of the annual salary with the total cost of induction, orientation, training, maintenance, termination, and lost opportunity.

There would be “skin and hair flying” in many management meetings if all these costs showed up on a Profit and Loss Statement line.

Your choice

So, what gets in the way of more consistent selection outcomes when it comes to hiring an ideal candidate based on a wish list? Most would agree that even the most basic selection process can get it right with the required qualifications and experience for a role. 

However, when it comes to attributes similar to the examples below, the ability to precisely assess if the person sitting in front of us possesses these is close to impossible:

• Tenacious 
• Ambitious
• Resilient 
• possesses Initiative
• will Remain calm and professional, and
• has an Excellent work ethic.

People tell us what they think we want to hear; after all, they are looking for a job!

Consequently, many of us make our hiring decisions based on our “gut feel” and what we “liked” about the candidate during the interview. In essence, we hire people we like. 

Given that research tells us that more than 40% of Australians think it’s okay to lie during an interview, this stacks the odds against us. We need to add some objective data to our “gut feel” to help us get it right more consistently.

The way forward for hiring more ideal candidates

The next generation award-winning Great People Inside (GPI) customisable assessment platform now available in Australia allows you to choose those specific attributes on your recruitment wish list. 

Therefore, if you want to assess certain attributes, these can readily be selected. For example, attributes like: 

• Resilience
• Tenacity
• Ambition
• Discipline
• Customer Focus
• Closing sales.

Over 60 validated psychometric dimensions are available to precisely evaluate the crucial traits for both your business and the specific role. And if we don’t have what you need, we will build it for you.  We call this full customisation.

With this in mind, no longer are you restricted to relying on your gut feel and hiring people you “like”. You can easily create GPI assessments as short or as long as you wish.

By adopting this approach, specific objective data can be added to your selection process and increase your success rate by up to 300%.

Don’t take our word for it!

We were delighted to recently receive the following feedback from one of our clients who has been using with great success the GPI platform for more than 18 months. This client uses the GPI platform to assess alignment to the company values of both internal employees and new recruits.

They tell us, “We are observing through using the GPI profiling tool to test for values fit, we are naturally defining critical success factors to base our hiring decisions on.

The more we benchmark our top performers and see success in our new recruits, the more we learn about what are the critical behaviours and interests that make a person a successful cultural fit in our business.

Whilst we would like to think we were good at picking this up before, GPI provides us with an evidence-based, tangible tool to confirm this and has been a real value add to our hiring decisions”. 

If you’d like to learn more, we’d be happy to let you try us for free. Click HERE, and we’ll be in touch straight away. 

The post Your ideal candidate when hiring – what’s on your wish list? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

Finding high performing staff involves a specific hiring approach which targets those with precisely the right attributes for the job in hand.

Once you have the right players, it doesn’t stop there. It’s a question of matching them to the right sales roles, managing them and developing the sales team in an ongoing way to ensure maximum efficiency and results.

Remember the old maxim ‘If you can sell, you can sell anything’?

Well, times have changed. Not all sales positions – or reps – are created equal.

According to studies analysed by Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney in their book How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer, around 50% of those working in sales lack the fundamental traits necessary in effective salespeople. A further 25% are selling the wrong thing, for the wrong managers, in the wrong place.

That leaves just 25% of salespeople operating to full capacity and producing great results.

So one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to finding the right salesperson to sell your product or services.

Financial benefits of hiring the best salespeople

Having a sales team composed of star performers can make a significant difference to your bottom line.

In a study of 100 businesses, Sales Force of Top Producers – A Manager’s (and Owner’s) Dream, reported in Employer’s Advantage, the company’s top performer outsold the bottom performer by a whopping average of 5.7 to 1 – with a range of 3:1 to 9:1.

Just imagine what kind of results you’d get if your entire team worked at the lower margin of 3:1, not to mention 5:1 or higher.

Salesforce Work.com and the TAS Group drew some more shocking statistics from their research. These include:

• Two-thirds of salespeople miss their quota.
• More than half of all salespeople close less than 40% of potential deals.
• Top-performing sales reps are 250% better at qualifying leads.
• High performers are 2.5 times more likely to be effective qualifiers than the general population.
• Around 40% of salespeople don’t understand their customer’s ‘pain’, addressing problems they don’t even have.
• Revenue can be up to 25% greater at companies where sales and marketing are well integrated.
• High performers are 57% more likely to come from companies where sales and marketing work in harmony.

Measuring an individual salesperson’s productivity

All this begs the question, just how productive is your own sales team? Can you measure individual productivity? And once you’ve measured it, how do you replace or improve poor and fair performers?

The answer is using the advanced science from the next generation of smart assessment tools. Our award-winning Great People Inside assessments will help you identify those essential success attributes for each sales role, enabling you to match it with the right employee.

Great People Inside’s dimensions assessment will tell you:

• what makes your top performers so great
• why your average performers are less effective
• how to improve your least successful performers

How to hire the best people

The right assessment tools can help you find the right people for your sales roles.

Applied correctly, Great People Inside tools can  make your recruitment of future high performers up to three times more successful and also significantly reduce sales department turnover by more than 27%.

These results should be music to any employer’s ear when considering the statistics.

Figures reported in Employer’s Advantage, show that three out of four new sales employees don’t last the distance. They have, in fact, only a 25% chance of staying with the company for a full year.

Of those that do stick, only one in 10 go on to become a genuine top performer within three years.

So what is the essential DNA of these star performers? Many have fundamental traits and attributes in common, which help drive their peak performance for the longer term.

Using our validated and reliable customised sales assessments, we work with you and scientifically evaluate your current top-performing salespeople.

These measures enable us to create a customised job profile benchmark specific to your company based on your company’s top performers, not a random benchmark based on a collection of external organisations. A company customised standard means you can clearly see what sets your top performers apart from the rest.

This benchmark can also be used to significant effect when recruiting new sales staff, ensuring that candidates fit these rigorous criteria and carry the ‘work genes’ critical to success in their roles.

What to look for in sales job candidates today

There are plenty of things to consider when hiring, but it’s vital that new employees are a good fit with company culture and embrace their new work environment.

They must be able to cope with challenges, build strong relationships with work colleagues – especially in the marketing department – and understand the needs of your customers.

As if hiring salespeople wasn’t challenging enough already, in this new world we live in, where face to face selling may not always be the accepted way, how do you know if the candidates have what it takes to sell remotely. Interestingly, psychologists tell us the many attributes for in-person sales success don’t work effectively when remote selling!

So what attributes do star sales performers typically have? Behavioural science tells us that they commonly possess the following traits:

• Agreeableness: Tendency to be friendly, approachable, and easy to get along with.
• Conscientiousness: Tendency to strive for perfection, sometimes at all costs.
• Stability: Degree to which one reacts positively to negative or stressful situations.
• Openness: Willingness to try new ways of doing things.
• Tenacity: Tendency to be determined and persevere.
• Control: Tendency to take charge of people and situations. Leads more than follows.
• Entrepreneurial Approach: The tendency to quickly seize and tenaciously pursue new opportunities for the organisation, taking calculated risks at a high level of autonomy.The right recruitment tools help you weed out unsuitable candidates and identify the cream of the crop.

Other benefits of hiring star sales performers

Revenue benefits are not the only advantages of building a high performing sales team.

By adopting a more scientific approach to recruitment, you remove much of your operational downside costs; costs that don’t always show up on your P&L:

• Frequent employee turnover – even from good people
• Time spent recruiting and training of replacements
• Lost sales through an empty seat during recruitment and induction training
• Wasted investment in salary and training for someone that doesn’t make it.
• Inability to close deals when not face to face.

Try us for FREE

You probably wouldn’t make a significant purchase without doing your research and acquiring objective data about your future potential investment. Then why would you hire a new salesperson costing more than $100K per annum using nothing more than your “gut feel” and highly subjective references?

At the end of the day if you’re happy with your current sales team’s success rate don’t change anything.

However, if you want to significantly increase your business performance talk to Great People Inside about our sales assessments – we’ll even let you try us risk-free and fee-free. Just click HERE, and we will be in touch.

The post What attributes do top salespeople have in common? appeared first on Directions Unlimited.

During the past nine months in Australia, many people’s businesses have been hit hard by the pandemic. Here at GPI, our thoughts are with the more than 900 families who lost loved ones during this crisis and for those whose livelihoods have been negatively impacted.

Recently though, some green shoots of hope have begun to sprout with domestic flying making a return, vaccines becoming available, and borders reopening in time for Christmas, it appears business conditions will significantly improve in 2021. 

With increased demand will come the need to hire additional people, but how can you increase your success rate and hire the right people the first time? And what about the new way of working from home? How will you identify those who will thrive and be productive in a work from home environment?

The traditional recruitment process leaves a lot up to chance. You might sift through a stack of resumes and possibly cover letters trying to narrow down the people with the right experience and qualifications and get a sense of other relevant aspects. You’ll then perform a round of interviews to gauge which candidate sounds and acts right for the role.

You might ask yourself, “does this person have the right skills to perform the job?.. the right credentials?.. enough experience?.. will they fit in with the workplace culture?.. can they bring anything to the table to benefit the business?” While some of these questions can easily be answered with a CV and interview, others are trickier. Some key questions are difficult to answer through the traditional hiring process such as “Will this person be engaged in their work and a great in this role?” “Will this person be capable and productive working remotely?”

Engagement is critical

Great managers and business owners know that higher employee engagement levels in the workplace translate to higher productivity and better company performance. So especially in this current environment, how can hiring managers improve the likelihood of selecting highly engaged top performers?

It all starts with thinking about how potential employees will “fit”, rather than experience, qualifications, and even age and gender. Studies have shown that these factors are not statistical indicators of future top performance in a job, but that ‘fit’ is what counts if you want a high performer.

Following a recruit being let go during probation many of us have heard comments such as “we had to let them go – they just didn’t fit” but what does this actually mean?

‘Fit’ refers to how well a person is suited to their job role and the surrounding workplace culture. Whether or not a person ‘fits’ in a particular position depends on a few factors, for example, their attitude, personality and enthusiasm for the work at hand. To find out which candidate is the right fit for the job and culture, hiring managers must check their biases at the door and use objective information to make their decision. Making this type of decision can be trickier than it sounds, but it is possible.

Assessment tools that allow you to develop a customised profile or model for the role you are hiring for bring objectivity into the hiring process. They validate data on existing performance, job tasks and results so that you hire individuals who are indisputably right for the role.

How does it work?

Hire someone who is objectively the right fit

Choosing the right person for a role can influence how long they stay in the job and how engaged they are with their work. According to Willis Towers Watson, employee engagement is defined as “employees’ willingness and ability to contribute to company success”. According to studies they conducted, businesses can expect a 13.7% rise in net income with engaged employees; I am sure most CEO’s would take this net income increase as a Christmas present!

While this knowledge is widespread with business owners and managers, the wrong people still get hired for roles time and time again. Why? Hiring someone using the traditional interview process and reference checks alone can be a bit of a guessing game. Someone might be highly proficient at talking their way through the interview process, but their skills at talking the talk mightn’t translate to walking the walk in the job.

Validated benchmarkable assessments take the guesswork out of the hiring process. They evaluate information about a person that cannot be determined by a traditional job interview. Instead of solely relying on opinions or a hunch, the assessments we recommend provide you with tools which use objective data to determine whether your candidate is right for the role.

Use your top performers as a benchmark for new talent

When a top performer walks out the door, it often feels like you’re back at square one, scrambling to build your team from the ground up again. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies, teams and hiring managers can make the process of replacing top performers easier, while improving their hiring process each time.

The Great People Inside customisable assessment tools we recommend not only provide you with a menu of dimensions you can choose from to measure those key attributes important for your business, but they can also significantly increase your success rate of identifying future superstars. These tools extract information on your best talents’ abilities, personality traits, behaviours, and preferred learning styles. Using this information creates a customised profile for hiring new people who can successfully fill the shoes of your existing and past top performers.

So how do you find out who is best suited to homeworking?

Buffer.com published an annual global survey (FIG 1) on homeworking and discovered in 2020 (like in previous years) that the top 3 difficulties people experience with homeworking, worldwide, are not necessarily related to the pandemic and lockdown:

• collaboration and communication
• loneliness, and
• not being able to unplug.

It suggests that many individuals will either need help to overcome these problems or even that, for some people, Working from Home is not a viable option.

FIG 1

Most employees, when asked if they would like to work from home, will answer yes – because they are only looking at the positive aspects of doing so. But this is the homeworking equivalent of asking someone ‘How are you?’ and accepting the answer ‘Fine.’ as confirmation that all is well.

You need a much more scientific approach if you are embarking on an enterprise-wide plan to introduce home working. Certain factors will help employers understand if, and where, their people will need help.

But what are those factors? And how do you measure them?

The Great People Inside difference

As an assessment business, Great People Inside specialises in creating assessments for the development of employees and teams. Although the size of the homeworking challenge is unprecedented, the essential work of analysing and developing your WFH team hasn’t changed – it’s what we do, all day, every day.

And because we customise assessments for specific purposes, we’ve developed a series of new assessments, informed by extensive, independent research, into the characteristics required for people to work, successfully, from home. These validated assessments will allow you not only to undertake a ‘health check’ of all your existing people, but also to identify whether that potential new hire has the capability and attributes required to be a star performer even when they are remote. Most importantly, these assessments will also enable you to respond to what they tell you. With our Partners, we offer individualised online development, provided by subject matter experts, to help your people cope with a new way of working.

The range of fully customisable Great People Inside assessment tools we recommend will enhance your selection process so that you can choose candidates that will help drive team and company performance and answer the question you had when starting the hiring process – “will this person be outstanding in this role even when working from home?” Which, after all, is what recruitment is all about!

If you would like to learn more about the Great People Inside assessments specifically designed for work from home employees and teams please click here to contact us or email australia@greatpeopleinside.com

www.greatpeopleinside.com/australia

The post How to get the right (remote) person first time when hiring appeared first on Directions Unlimited.