How do you hire new talent?
New candidates will have a direct impact on your business but this can be a double edged sword. If your new person goes to their tasks and masters them quickly, they will give off a great impression to everyone they deal with in the company and particularly your outside partners and clients. However if they are unsure of what they are doing and tend to make mistakes, this can threaten the image of the company. One should always remember that every employee is an ambassador for the company and an individual’s shortcomings can be construed as companywide failures.
Obviously everyone needs training to develop their skills and be brought up to speed with a new position. There will be an adjustment period but after a certain amount of time has passed, there is an assumed level that your recent hire should be performing at. If this is not happening on a regular basis, a company may need to address how they look for new talent. This brings us back to the initial point: how do you hire new talent?
Let’s take for example an entry level position in sales. The traditional recruiting practice is to judge applicants based on some prior employment as well as their educational record. You may consider any extracurricular events they took part in as well. The conventional wisdom is that all sales are as easy as A.B.C. Always Be Closing.
At eQ, we believe that the C mentioned is much more about the character of the person than their college results or prior competencies. Trainers can teach you how to sell, how to speak with clients, and how to have professional business etiquette. But even the best of instructors cannot make you smile genuinely when talking to clients or have sincere enthusiasm when discussing the company's products or services. These types of attributes are something that you either have or you don’t.
People of character will make hard decisions and do the right thing even when nobody is watching. It speaks to how they look at life and it strongly suggests that they will always maintain their personal integrity. In almost all sales positions, you are buying the salesperson as much as you are the product or service. Would you buy from someone you did not respect or hold in good standing?
Next time you find yourself in an interview and you look over at the candidate, what will you C? To quote a very wise person whose own pesonal attributes have been held in admiration for generations:
“Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” - Abraham Lincoln
Donal O'Donoghue is an account manager at entreQuest who specializes in expanding work forces by finding the best talent with the ideal personalities to place in a wide range of positions across all types of industries.
