On your marks, get set, GO! The race for talent is on

We’re gearing up for a wild time in the job market. Masks are coming off and life is getting back to normal. Companies are implementing growth plans and individuals who’ve been “sheltering in job” are updating their resumes. Those who aren’t actively looking are now open to a well-presented opportunity. Even good companies and managers will be scrambling for talent.

As a business leader, your personal success is dependent on having the right people in place. Here are three things you can do to ensure that you’re well-positioned.

Share the Love. Spend some time with your top performers. Let them know you appreciate and recognize them and their contributions. Talk with them about their career goals and make a plan to help them get there. People work for people. Your best are less likely to respond to competitive opportunities when they’ve got a solid future where they are and a supportive manager who’s got their back.

Streamline your hiring process, so you’re ready to roll when the need arises. Companies with sluggish hiring practices will lose top talent to more nimble competitors. Tighten up your interview process and feedback loops. In a candidate-driven market, you also need to lead with a candidate-focused Employer Value Proposition that details why the person you seek would want to work for you and your company. While you’re at it, scrap your traditional job description’s list of requirements in favor of a Performance Profile that clearly defines the success metrics by which your new hire will be judged. This will help ensure that the person you hire not only can do the job but also wants to do the job.

Put your oxygen mask on first. We’ve all heard this expression. Strong leaders attract strong candidates. The strongest leaders have a clear vision – and you cannot share your vision if it’s murky. It’s important that you conduct your personal career audit – are you in the right place? Are you well-positioned for your next career step? Do you even know what that step should be? Top talent will follow their leader into the fray – as long as that leader knows where they’re going.

I can’t guarantee that you won’t lose anyone as the job market picks up, or that you’ll land every candidate you go after – but following these three steps will help. And so will I. Call me.

Debbie Harper is the President of Harper Hewes Executive Search and Recruiting, a boutique search firm. She has over 25 years of experience helping software, consulting, and services firms build, grow, and level up their leadership and teams by targeted direct recruiting (headhunting.) She is reached at www.harperhewes.com or +1 585-321-1700.

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How much is that open territory really costing you?

Your sales plan – and your personal success – is based on having your sales team fully staffed and 100% productive – but what if it isn’t? Let’s look at the cost of just one open territory.

Assume a $1.2m quota. You’d think that every month the position is unfilled it costs you $100,000, but that’s not telling the whole story. That simple math assumes that the new hire is immediately at 100% productivity from the day they start. A lovely thought, but not even close to reality. Sales training experts project that it takes a new rep 90 days in addition to your normal sales cycle to close new business. Add to that the time it takes to find the right person to hire.

Here’s a more likely scenario:

• Source, engage, interview, hire and start: 90 days. Revenue lost: $300,000

• Onboarding / assimilation: 90 days. Revenue lost: $300,000.

• Ramp / sales cycle: 6 months. Revenue lost: $600,000

TOTAL REVENUE LOST: $1,200,000 – an entire year’s worth of quota!

Granted this is (hopefully) a worst-case scenario. Your new rep may land some small deals along the way. In the case of a backfill, there may be business left on the table, but the reality is – good sales execs don’t leave until they’ve closed out their big deals, and poor performers don’t really have much pipeline to leave behind.

Every single week that territory is open it costs you $25K in lost revenue. Ka-ching, ka-ching. It adds up fast.

You need a plan to fill your opens as quickly as possible.  Here are four things you can do to save time and get your revenue back on target:

1.     Scrap the old-style job descriptions. Create a Candidate Centered Value Proposition that clearly defines the kind of person who’s proven successful for your team. You want to attract a producer, not a seat-filler.

2.     Hire a book of business. Look for someone with established relationships that can be leveraged going forward.

3.     Go after them. Skip the “post and pray.” You don’t need dozens of iffy ad responses to weed through. You need a handful of qualified, hirable candidates with documented accomplishments who can hit the ground running.

4.     Hire a professional headhunter to get the job done faster and more efficiently - and get your revenue back on track quickly.

Time is money, both your wasted time going through a long and unfulfilling hiring process and the time wasted when the open territory isn’t covered. And the ultimate waste of time – settling for the wrong person. #hiringsalesreps #saassales #lostrevenue #software sales #consultingsales

In a future article, we’ll address the many indirect costs of an open territory, including loss of management time, loss of momentum with key prospects, impact on team morale and PR challenges. 

Hiring Mistakes – Vetting the Candidate

“But s/he was such a good fit on paper!”  How many times have you heard that description of a failed hire?  Unfortunately, the paper is only part of the story. It’s the person behind the paper that matters.  The answers to three key questions will most often determine the success of a hire.

CAN they do the job?   Pretty basic, right?  Of course the candidate must have the requisite hard skills. In many instances, however, the environment in which they apply those skills gets overlooked.  Scope, scale and context are as important as the skills themselves.  If you’re hiring a technology executive to support a 24x7 retail operation, do you really want someone from custom manufacturing? Granted, the tools may be the same, but they’ll be providing different vastly different solutions – and in fact may not even understand the questions. The resumes of a candidate managing a team of 10 and one managing a division of 100 may read the same, but require vastly different leadership skills.  A business development or sales exec who’s used to carrying a multimillion dollar quota may not understand the dynamics of selling a single million dollar deal. And the list goes on. 

WILL they do the job?  We are all capable of doing many different things. But it’s not enough to have the ability to do a job; the candidate has to want to do your job. The individual’s goals and the company’s goals need to be in sync, and both must share the same vision of success.  The word “passion” is almost a cliché in executive search right now, but the fact remains that people are complicated. We really only excel at the things that capture both our hearts and our heads.  

Do they FIT?  Cultural fit is crucial to a successful long term hire. Culture includes physical environment, process and attitude, among other things. It’s everything from jeans and t-shirts vs. suits, to communication style, to decision making process. If an executive is accustomed to working in a large environment that requires multiple levels of input, they may freeze when the decision is theirs alone. Likewise, someone who’s used to “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” may stagnate in a more deliberate, highly process-oriented environment.  A creative type won’t last in a company whose reason for doing things is “because that’s the way we’ve always done them.”

A failed hire damages more than just the egos of the parties involved. It costs the company money, opportunity, morale and momentum. Vetting a candidate in these three areas – can they, will they, do they fit - will go a long way in avoiding costly hiring mistakes.

The Rise of the Written Interview

You thought you were done writing essays when you graduated from school, didn’t you? Think again.  More and more frequently our clients are requesting writing samples from all candidates, not just those being considered for a formal communications role.

Consider this. As companies have slashed costs,  the administrative ranks have been particularly hard hit. The admins that remain are often shared and almost always overworked.  With the sheer volume of written communication demanded in the business world today most of us are our own “admins.” When‘s the last time you actually dictated a document?

Just as the quantity of written business communication has exploded, the quality has imploded. In addition to errors in grammar (my personal favorite is their / there / they’re) many times people forget that a sentence contains a subject and a verb, starts with an upper case letter and ends with punctuation. I admit to being guilty of this – as well as an over reliance on both the m-dash and the phrase “as well as.”   Factor in the proliferation of tweet speak, emoticons and acronyms, and IMHO  the ability to communicate clearly and concisely in writing has taken on increased importance.

Enter the written interview. Its purpose is to illustrate both your thought process and your writing ability. A typical written interview includes 6 to 10 open ended questions. Topics covered usually include past successes, challenges, your business philosophy, and a couple of situational questions. A written interview requires timely completion, unlike a resume or cover letter which can be wordsmithed for weeks. It demonstrates your ability to process the question and engage the reader with your answer. And just as when you were in school, neatness and grammar count.

Rather than resist this trend as just one more hoop to jump through, I encourage candidates to use it to their advantage. A written interview allows you to position yourself as the best person for the job by providing you an opportunity to address issues of specific importance to the employer. You get to state your case, unfiltered, and without reliance on the memory or note taking skills of the interviewer. The questions also give you insight into the priorities and culture of your potential next employer so you can better assess your fit with the opportunity offered.

So fire up your laptop and get to work. Your next career opportunity may depend on it!