Today businesses are relentlessly looking to improve productivity, eliminate waste and grow revenues by driving the performance of front line sales people. 

Whilst facilitated by an ever increasing investment in technology, such as CRM, the ability to recruit, motivate and retain the best people is more important. Every contact between customer and sales staff can gain or lose business as customers increasingly expect nothing less than service excellence.
High performing sales people are at a premium and most recruiters complain about the scarcity of good cabdidates. Companies are also finding it difficult to retain sales staff. CVs show sales staff moving every 2 years whereas ten years ago every 7 years was the average. Job ‘hoppers’ used to be frowned on but now they are becoming the norm. A new generation of talented professionals seek more lifestyle benefits, look for greater personal development and offer limited commitment to employers by moving on in under 24 months. The top raft of managers are often so highly qualified and able that they can succeed in almost any job, so employers have to look deeper into their staff profiles to have any chance of keeping them.

This presents companies with a critical challenge – how to hire and retain the best sales people.

Traditional recruitment techniques tend to be based on interviews and basic psychometric testing. Such tests explore past experience, assess numerical and verbal competencies and provide a basic psychological profile. What they do not do is benchmark a candidate against the specific challenges and skills of the role – a key step in recruiting and retaining the right people.

Research from the Harvard Business Review, following 360,000 people for 20 years, indicated that none of the usual selection methods can really predict success. 

In fact, interviewing, CVs and reference checks will only give you a 26% likelihood of recruiting the right person. The research revealed no relationship between performance and educational qualifications, gender, age, race, experience, or any other criteria frequently used to select people for jobs.

One answer lies in Job Matching. Harvard Business Review also discovered that people were most successful when they were ‘matched’ into jobs that they were capable of doing, were motivated to do, in an environment that suited their personality and behaviour. 

Further studies confirmed conclusively that those who were job matched:

• Outperformed their non-job-matched peers in the first six months
• Significantly outperformed the group after 14 months
• Tended to stay in their jobs much longer, reducing employee turnover and the associated costs of advertising, recruitment, management time, down time, morale etc.

Job matching will raise the likelihood of recruiting the right person to 75%.
 
The Profile XT assesses exactly how effectively a candidate’s behavioural traits will fit the needs of a role and identifies those with an innate talent for selling by looking at the ‘total person’. Its versatility means that as well as an effective recruitment tool, it can also be used for training, coaching, promotion and succession planning.

Initially, a job profile or pattern is developed that determines the ideal personal characteristics needed for the job. A profile that is developed through a ‘Job Analysis Survey’ and ‘profiling’ existing high performers. The results provide a job match pattern that illustrates the Thinking Styles, Behaviours and Interests that are ideal for the role.

As an example, call centre staff need good verbal reasoning, high assertiveness levels and want to give good service. Using a job pattern makes it easy to identify where candidates will fit well into positions and where they may have to make adjustments.

The job pattern is a great tool for recruitment and development of internal staff. As an example, take the case a high performing sales professional, do you reward outstanding performance with:

• Promotion to the role of Sales Manager – a role in which the individual is challenged to lead and develop individuals and the team.
• A senior account management role - where the ability to develop customer relationships is the challenge

How do you know the individual’s deeply embedded interests and traits and – more importantly – are they aligned with the prospective role?

There is a quick way to find out – Job Matching!

This is a fast and inexpensive to run, completed on-line questionnaire and immediately generates a suite of informative reports to the company. Data is collected, scored and an overall suitability assessment made.

In the increasingly competitive market for high performing sales staff, Job Matching can effectively identify people exactly suited to specific sales roles, and ensure that given a close fit, staff will stay.
Angela Stephenson