SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
The Myth of Experience
September 10, 2008
Experience is what managers commonly look for in job candidates. But if you're truly interested in hiring top performers, the first thing you need to cross off your hiring to-do list is looking for people who have just the "right" experience.
By Herb Greenberg and Patrick Sweeney
Sales managers often view experience as the ultimate tie-breaker when making a final hiring decision. If there are two seemingly equally-qualified candidates for a position and one has slightly more experience, the decision seems easy. Experience always wins out. But how often do you come across someone who has had 10 years of experience to find out that those 10 years really just equals up to one year of bad experience repeated 10 times.
Ultimately, hiring is one of the most important business decisions we make. Yet, those decisions are all too often forced under deadline pressures. With a pressing need to fill an empty chair. I'm not saying to forget about experience—obviously it counts. But, as Aldous Huxley said so well, "Experience is not what happens to you…it's what you do with what happens to you.
So when hiring top performers, take a look beyond experience and follow these tips to ensure a good hire.
1. Don't steal from your competitors. Many executives look in their competitors' backyards for high-performing individuals who are ready to make a move. Conventional wisdom is that an experienced individual will hit the ground running. But the price can be high for taking this easy road.
Think about it for a minute: When you're putting together a "help wanted" ad, what's the first thing you write?
"Need a manager (or salesperson, or whatever you are looking for) with at least five years experience in the widgets industry."
Sounds great, right? Wrong.
The truth is, we all have a tendency to think of experience in a way that is entirely too limiting. What we should be looking for is not direct experience but transferable skills. It is not whether someone has sold the same product or service before, but what have they carried with them:
• Are they able to initiate relationships easily?
• Can they get a client to open up?
• Do they know how to identify and solve problems?
These are some of the transferable skills that can take an individual successfully from one position to another—and even from one career to another.
2. Look for demonstrations of what applicants have learned from what they've accomplished. Effective hiring has less to do with experience and more to do with potential. How has a candidate’s experiences altered his life, formed his philosophies and defined who he is? The point is to look beyond the past to someone’s potential.
Instead of hiring someone who has had just the "right" experience, hire someone who has the potential for growth and has the same qualities as your top performers.
3. Know the qualities that distinguish your current top performers. In order to hire effectively, you have to start out by knowing what distinguishes your best employees from the rest. Delve below the surface. What do they have that the others lack? What are they really made of? What qualities do they possess? What drives them to succeed?
An in-depth personality profile can provide the insights you need into whether an applicant has the potential you are looking for. Is it their empathy? Their persuasiveness? Their perseverance? Their ability to connect with people in a very real way? The capacity to quickly analyze problems and arrive at solutions?
Discover that. Then look for applicants who have those same qualities. That's the potential you're looking for.
4. Hone your interviewing skills. Interviewing is a very inexact science. It's probably more of an art form, really. Still, as Peter Drucker says, "The best leaders ask the best questions." And they know what to listen for. What you want to get at is: Do they have a moonshot? A purpose? A driving ambition to achieve something worth doing? Listen for how clearly they express what they really want to do. Their dreams. What they want to accomplish.
A great question that will discover an answer to most of these underlying themes is: Tell me about a time when you failed or were rejected. How did you deal with it?
This will provide insights into how well your candidates know themselves—and whether they take rejection a bit too personally, or can bounce back with an "I'll show you" attitude.
Other questions include:
• What is the most significant achievement you've accomplished in your present job? If they can't come up with anything, that will tell you a lot. When they have to select one thing, it can be very revealing about what they think is important—then you can decide whether it is also important to you.
• What one aspect of your current job would you eliminate, if you could? If they want to eliminate something that is key to the position you are seeking to fill, that is important to know.
• What is your favorite part of your current job? Like any good question, the flip-side can also tell you as much about whether the individual has real depth.
The answers to these questions will start to give you insight into the applicant. In all honesty, the answers won't tell you who the final candidate should be, but they can tell you who you should avoid.
The Pursuit of Potential
Ultimately, you want to focus on the potential, the qualities that distinguish your best applicants. Are they the same qualities that distinguish your current top performers? If they are, then that individual has the potential to grow with your company.
Don't fall into the myth of relying upon experience. Instead look for potential. That's why there is always an image of flowers on a package of seeds. We don't really care what the seeds look like. We want to know what they will become.
Open up your hiring process, open your doors and open yourself to uncovering and developing the potential of individuals. The real winners in this world are those individuals who know who they are…and they know how to play to their strengths. And they are willing to take a risk on someone else's potential.
Find that in yourself. Look for it in others. And you will be well on your way to surrounding yourself with top performers.
Herb Greenberg is the President and Patrick Sweeney is the Executive Vice President of Caliper, a global management consulting firm, which advised over 25,000 companies around the world on hiring and developing top performers.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
|
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Management Index |
|
|
