Here is what I teach participants in leadership and management seminars. Sales managers (or managers to be) find this process to be very useful and effective.
How to Identify?
Before that, perhaps it is wise to think about what do we want to find out about the potential candidate.
3 things:
1) Character (driven? motivated? focus?)
2) Personality (outgoing or introvert? emotional or logical? team player?)
3) Ability (skills, qualification and experience)
In most cases, the 3rd objective can easily be met by upfront filtering - informing the candidates what is required for the position and going through the resume. During the interview, it will be the job of the interviewer to determine the 1st two.
How do we go about doing that? 3 ways too ...
1) Powerful questions such as the following can reveal a great deal ...
# why do you want leave your last job?
# what do you value most in life?
# what do you like best about ... ?
2) Profiling tools (such as DiSC, MBTI) give you insights into the inner working of the person. Sometimes, even in areas that the person is not aware of. The profiling exercise can be done on the same or different day as the interview.
3) Situational tests
These tests bring out the most instinctive response of the participants. You can tell what kind of person they are from the way they respond. Situational tests do not have to be complicated and elaborated. They can come in the form of simple games and questionnaires as well.
How to Recruit?
During this process, you are offering the position to your best candidate. So you are selling. You should go back to the fundamentals of selling - finding out the need and wants and offering something that meet them.
Unfortunately, most people do not know what they want!
For example, sales manager often ask new sales profession how much do they want to earn every month?
Say, if the reply is $10k, than the manager will help to calculate how many sales is required to make that amount of commission. The manager can also estimate how much work is required to produce these sales, assuming a standard ratio for every close within a certain number of qualified prospects.
So now, the new staff knows exactly how much work is necessary to achieve his dream. Will he or she be committed enough to do it? Yes, but in most cases, no.
Why? Well, when the actual work started, often people find it too hard, tough or even time consuming! They then "downgrade" their dream.
Or the other possibility is that their priorities may change ... they may now become less ambitious and focus on their families. Or it could the other way round, they become more ambitious and now both the job and company are too "small" for them.
This is where your profiling tools can help too. You can tell the need of a person from his or her personality type.
Together with questioning skills, you will be able to discover what each candidate wants.
How to Retain?
In the 1st place, ask why would anyone leave a team?
Well, the answer will be: their expectations are not met, and there is little (or no) hope of meeting their expectations in the future.
So, the next logical step will be: Find out what are their expectations - which you already did in step 2.
However, nothing stays constant for more than a hundred days. What you should do is continuously communicate. Create a constant feedback loop through meetings, lunches, tea breaks and gatherings so that you can monitor when their expectations changes.
Communication also builds trust.
Like all relations - the element of trust is a critical success factor. The employee must trust that they are in good hands and their expectations will continued to be met.
The main thing about trust is that the staff must find the superior dependable and reliable. This stage can only be attained after a period of working together. To achieve this, you will have to go back to basic - your consistency in words, actions and thoughts.
teck beng
www.coachme2sell.com
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