VIDEO: Practical Sales Tips to Help Business Owners Hire Top Talent

by | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, For Salespeople, Leadership Development, Sales Techniques, Team Manager Skills, Videos & Podcasts

Click here to watch as Scott Wintrip interviews Tony for his blog.

Tony shares practical sales tips to help business owners get top talent to pick their jobs.

Watch the Video Here:

You may also enjoy these webinars from Tony:

 

Video Notes: (more…)

Google Data Show ‘Behavioral Interviewing’ Works

by | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills

 

 

[Our data on hiring at Google show that] what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.

Behavioral interviewing  — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

— Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President
of People Operations at Google
in Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
via The New York Times.com

 

 

See also, on this blog,
How to Write an Ad to Hire Employees.

 

 

Candidates not to hire; employees to fire.

by | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills

 

 

A Wall Street Journal article identified three personality types that are poison in your workforce:

  • Deadbeats: withhold effort,
  • Downers: express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity and irritation, &
  • Jerks: violate interpersonal norms of respect.
Good research shows how just one will pull down the performance of an entire team. Click here to read more about how bad apples spoil the barrel.

 

 

How to Write an Ad that Attracts Outstanding Employees

by | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills

 

 

Barry DeutschAlmost all job postings, yours included, describe the absolute minimally acceptable qualifications. Why aim low? You know people will stretch their credentials and experience a bit to apply, so describing the least you will accept will attract many résumés that are totally inappropriate. Sound familiar? Here’s the antidote, with credit and thanks to Vistage speaker Barry Deutsch,  my guru for job ads. Some of his advice and training for hiring managers is here. Click here for much more from him.

 

Based on my memory of his talks and seeing the principles applied by many of my clients, here are some of the keys for writing an ad that attracts the right candidates:

 

  • When searching for a person to fill a job opening it seems natural to describe the history of the person you are seeking. That’s a mistake.
    • You’re not in business to hire people.
      You’re in business to create results. Therefore…
    • Don’t describe the person–describe the results that person must produce to be successful.
  • Spend more time on what the person will be doing than what the company does.
    • Good candidates will go to the website to learn about you. Disqualify the ones who do not.
  • Write it from the seeker’s point of view, in the second person.
    • You love to help people get in action on their problems
    • You can’t walk away from your desk until everything is double checked, logged, and filed.
  • Describe breakout success
    • Too many job ads and descriptions detail the minimum requirements.
    • Describe outstanding success in detail, with numbers and vivid examples.
  • Make it interesting and compelling; describe a place the right candidate would be eager to go every day.
    • Sell your culture and values. Employees who resonate with your fundamentals will be productive long-term.

 

 

See also, on this blog,
Google Data Show ‘Behavioral Interviewing’ Works