5 Helpful Tips to Find and Hire Your Next Super Star

With the focus of most interviewing skills training programs on the key questions to ask of a candidate to learn about their core abilities and attitudes, there is little attention paid to the recruitment side of the process or to securing their acceptance of your offer. When you are looking for your next super star, you need to look in the right places, attract their attention, and convince them that your business strategy and outlook makes sense and that they will thrive and prosper within your unique corporate culture.

Forget the egg-on-the-spoon race. Here are five tips on how to conduct your search and how to win the competition for top talent that fits:

1. Never stop looking.
Keep your pipeline of talented potential hires filled. Get to know who is out there and, even if you are not ready to hire, keep in touch so that you are poised to make an offer when a position opens.

2. Cast your net in the right places.
Be sure you are fishing in the right pond. Think about what media your target recruits consume and what networks they belong to. Surely they are on LinkedIn. And they are no doubt in touch with many other top players in their own and other industries. Put the word out through your own team and network.  Request they pass it on to friends/colleagues who might be interested.

3. Use a compelling pitch.
Please do not start your ad with a bland description of what your company does. You want go-getters, not folks who have the time to read through boring text to get to the main point.

Start off with what a top job seeker would be interested in: career development and potential, salary, opportunities and challenges and innovative tools. Grab their attention from the very start. And then you can continue with a compelling description of the company and industry. Speak directly in the first person and use active language. Don’t narrow the field by listing too many requirements, especially those that are not absolutely critical to job success and cultural fit.

4. Be upfront with your interviewing process.
There is nothing more discouraging to a top candidate than to be led through a long series of interviews with no end in sight. At the outset, explain what hoops they will have to go through before a hiring decision is made. They may not like it but at least they will have been forewarned and are likely to be more patient as the process drags on.

5. If your culture is high performance-oriented, use that competitive edge.
Top talent like to know that they will be respected and valued in your corporate culture. They will want to join a winning, positive, valued team and one that has the support of the executives with the purse strings.

Onboarding for Success – Four Important Steps After the Interviews are Finished

After an exhaustive behavioral interviewing process, you have announced your selections and the new hires are thrilled. The matches seem perfect…just the skills, attitude, experience and cultural fit you were looking for. Thank goodness for your interviewing skills training. It guided you through identifying just what critical behavioral competencies the open jobs required.

But experienced hiring managers know this is only the first step. Now what?

The challenge is not only to hire the right talent but to bring them aboard and help them be successful as quickly as possible…not only for their satisfaction and feeling of value to the company but also for the good of the organization. Especially in the field of sales.

If you are in charge of hiring new sales reps and of their new hire orientation, here are 4 tips to help you do it right in terms of speed to productivity:

1. Provide targeted training and job aids on what they will be selling.
The better your new hires understand what the product/service can do and what important customer problems it solves, the more authentically they will represent it. They may not need to know every detail…but they should be able to thoroughly know who uses it, how they use it, why they use it, when they use and where they use it compared to the competition. At a minimum, they need to understand the product/service enough to satisfy typical customer questions, concerns and objections through the sales process.

2. Share a complete profile of your ideal target customer.
Who will they be selling to? New hires need to understand the ideal client profile including target industry, geography, size, title, role, buying trigger, business driver and situation attributes.  They need to deeply understand the most pressing needs of their target buyers so they can create compelling hooks that will help their customers to succeed. The bottom line - new sales reps need to know what important problems their customers face so they can design solutions that will add measurable value.

3. Clearly Articulate What Differentiates You From Your Competition.
Sales reps need to know what specifically sets you apart in the eyes of your target clients and gives you a distinct competitive advantage.  Do you it cheaper?  Faster? Better? Bigger? Easier? With less risk?  Whatever your edge, it must be relevant and believable enough to resonate with your target clients compared to the other priorities on their agenda.

4. Fill them in on and train them in your company’s sales methodology.
What is the preferred sales process?  Who does the prospecting? Who does the qualifying? At what point do they enter the sales process? How does marketing support their efforts?  What technology and tools are available to help make them more productive?  And how far do they take the sale…through the close, contract and follow-up? The sales process varies with every sales team. The sooner your new hires become familiar with how it works best in your company and who is in charge of what step, the faster they will be productive and the more satisfied they will be with their own contribution.