Tag: retention

The Truth About Older (50+) Salespeople

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Diversity, Employment Retention, Employment Value Proposition, Generational Gap, Hiring, Interviewing, Latest News and Articles, Millennials, Workforce Cuture

Wisdom is the knowledge base that will assist our future leaders.

Imagine if you will a time when you are getting a little bit older, a touch grayer and you start reflecting on what are you going to do when you get too mature for the industry you are in.

I have always had this question, but never bold enough to write about it. I’ve had a lot of opinions on this as the market is getting younger by the minute. People want to put millennials on pedestals and assume they are the next coming of…well whatever. I do not. But what I do say is they are dang smart. We Xers can learn tons from them.

The problem, however, is they lack the experience of hitting a curve ball. This can be taught of course, but won’t happen until they have failed a number of times. Knowledge and wisdom come from experience, not case studies.

I don’t fear getting older. I love it. I don’t fear millennials, I encourage them. 1+1 = power. Let’s embrace learning from one another. By the way, I am not 50+!!!

~The Organic Recruiter

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The Truth About Older (50+) Salespeople

 | Technology Sales Author, Sales Researcher, Founder Heavy Hitter Sales Training, USC Faculty

It is still hard times for salespeople (and sales managers) over 50 today. When companies downsize, they find themselves five times more likely to be let go when compared to their younger counterparts. They also have a more difficult time finding new jobs because younger sales managers have five basic fears about hiring someone older than themselves:

They are Un-coachable. Younger sales managers fear older salespeople are set in their ways and won’t take their directions.

They aren’t Technically Savvy. Younger sales managers fear they haven’t ingrained technology (smartphones, e-mail, and web-based sales force automation) into their daily working routine (nor are they up-to-date on the internet, social media, etc.).

They are “Washed Up.” Younger sales managers fear older reps are burned out from too many years “carrying the bag.”

They Have a Poor Work Ethic.  For a variety of family, personal, or health reasons, younger sales managers question how hard they will work.

They Really Want My Job! Perhaps the biggest fear of a younger manager is that he is hiring someone who may upstage him or her in the eyes of senior management in order to fulfill an ulterior motive of taking over their job.

Given these fears, I would like to offer five factors sales managers should consider when choosing between younger and more senior salespeople.

  1. Do you have to Sell to the C-Level? The C-level Executive sell is based upon establishing credibility and trust. Who do think has an easier time establishing rapport with senior executives; a 26 or 56 year old salesperson?
  2. It’s about relationships (not Rolodexes). Never hire any salesperson solely based on their Rolodex (if you’re under 30 you might have to look this word up) of customer contacts they claim to possess. Hire the salesperson who has a successful track record at penetrating new accounts and proven their ability of turning aloof prospects into close friends.
  3. Wit. Most companies make previous experience in the same industry their main criterion for hiring. Since these salespeople command the industry nomenclature, they are assumed to be qualified candidates. A more important hiring criterion is how candidates respond to pressure. In other words, how quick-witted or fast on their feet are they? What is their ability to learn quickly? Are they able to solve complex problems in real time? In this regard, don’t judge a book by its cover and assume a little gray hair means a lot less grey matter.
  4. Sales is a Mentor-based Profession. Sales organizations are mentor-based environments. Inexperienced salespeople don’t know what they haven’t seen for themselves. Usually, it’s through the “school of hard knocks” that they gain their experience. Unfortunately, this takes time. The entire sales team can benefit from emulating salespeople who have accumulated a reservoir of experience working with customers.
  5. Who Do You Trust!?! Peek into the cockpit as you board your next commercial flight. Chances are you are putting your life in the hands of one of the 70,000 airline pilots that are over 50 years old.

About the Author:  Steve W. Martin is the author of the “Heavy Hitter” series of books for senior salespeople on the human nature of complex sales. The Heavy Hitter corporate sales training program has helped over 100,000 salespeople become top revenue producers. Steve is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review and he teaches at the University of Southern California Marshall Business School MBA program. Visit www.stevewmartin.com to learn more.

Do You Know Why You Want It?

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Employment Value Proposition, Hiring, Latest News and Articles, Military, Millennials, Uncategorized

why-you-do-itAs we move into December and hear the pitter patter of feet running to make their wish lists, we too quietly ponder what we’d like for the holidays and in 2017. After all, haven’t we all been good girls and boys?

During a conversation with one of my best friends this last weekend we discussed the entertainment business he works in. Our conversation was about how the original ideas of some TV shows get lost because the executive producers start fighting over who has the best notes. By the time it gets to the editor, the initial idea of the show is lost.

No one says it better than Simon Sinek in his book “Start with Why”.

Without the Why you have lost your What. If the producers had stopped to remember why they were creating the show, they would not have lost the What. What was the purpose of the show and why? Could the show have been more successful if the judgement was not clouded by ego?

Every day we go after the shiny bullet or the cool new toy that everyone is talking about on Facebook or any other social media or blog. Whether it be the latest ATS such as Workday or Greenhouse to the ever changing LinkedIn. As a society we are always getting sold into the pretty tool because it helped solve someone else’s problem. The question is: will it solve your problem? Are you chasing your own solution or what someone has told you is your solution? Do you know what your Why is? Why are you doing whatever it is?

Companies boast being “military friendly”. Why does the company want to be military friendly and how has the company achieved it? Was the purpose to check a box or was it to reach out to veterans to offer thanks and help transition him/her back into a civilian job? I once sat at a bar with a recruiter and in conversation with a stranger, she learned he was a vet. She immediately reached out to give her business card and offered to help. She mentioned military.com and how it had helped many vets in her network find a position. In my opinion, that’s “military friendly”. Simply posting a position on a supposedly “military friendly” site does not equate to being military friendly. What site is that? How many veteran viewers does it link to? What efforts does that site do to reach out to veterans? What else is the company doing to reach out to the veterans?

What is your why? If you have a wish list, what is on it and why is it there?  Are you looking to appease shareholders? Is it to attract the right talent? Is it to do the right thing at the right time? Is it to increase your ROI of time, money or retention?

you-why“Start with Why” explains how to inspire with ideas rather than product. Simon Sinek goes on in his 2 of his 3 theories being:

  • The Golden Circle:
    • Sinek states, most people in a company know what they do; less people know how they do it; and hardly anyone knows why they do it
  • The Celery Test:
    • If you’re at a grocery store getting food for your health food business, could someone look at your groceries at the checkout line and immediately know what you’re all about?  If you’ve purchased soy milk, chocolate, pudding, and celery the answer is no.  If you’re just purchasing the soy milk and celery, then yes.
    • In business, if you’re not passing the celery test, if you can’t walk the walk after talking the talk, you’ve lost credibility and frankly damaged your integrity.

People buy Apple products because even before Tim Cook, Steve Jobs would only speak on the Why long before he showed you the what.

The founders of Southwest Airlines knew people would love to fly with them because they built their airline on the Why they wanted to fly, rather than just getting to their destination through crappy service.

What’s on your list this year? Why do you want it?

Let’s talk about your Why.

~The Organic Recruiter | Co-wrote with Candy Store

Millennials: You’re Not That Cool

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Diversity, Employment Retention, Employment Value Proposition, Generational Gap, Hiring, Interviewing, Latest News and Articles, Millennials

One of the biggest conundrums of companies to date is “what do I do about millennials?”, “how do we hire millennials?, and “how do we change for them?”.  The simple truth is you do nothing different and by all means, you don’t change for them.

It’s just like you have always done, you want the right candidate for the right job. You don’t change your identity or your culture for your friends, do you? Why should you do that for your company? Millennials are amazing and bright young adults. Remember when you wanted to change the world when you were their age? Did the companies change for you? Of course not.

As William Wallace said, “Hoooolllld, Hoooolllld!”. It’ll be okay guys. We will survive and this generation will take us to the next level. Be patient. ~ The Organic Recruiter

By – Candy Store | June 6th, 2016 ~ I asked a good friend (who chose anonymity) of mine who has been recruiting for top talent for a decade to give an undercover thought on talent today. For more candy just ask and I will go to the store.

Have you ever looked at a Millennial resume and thought “Why on Earth are you deemed the most important generation to recruit?” I have. I do often. I look at the resumes coming through and read all the articles about how we need to focus on recruiting this generation by tailoring to their expectations and think to myself: WHY? What makes this generation so special?

Well friends, I have to tell you: conception, perception, reception.

Conception

Every generation has a name. In a way, each one of us has been categorized and generalized with standard attributes of the relative generation. We are conceived and then misconceived due to these generalities awarded. There is truth to it but varying degrees.

Generation Name Births Starting Births Ending
Baby Boomer Generation 1945 1964
Generation X 1961 1981
Generation Y – The Millennials – Gen Next 1975 1995
Generation Z – iGen 1995 2015

Perception

Did Millennials make themselves special or were they designated as the special generation because of the luxuries they have from an inspiring environment? Did they become a byproduct of Gen X where inventions and dreams were evolving? There is an abundance in technology and ideas are enabled to flourish.  Was Gen X taken for granted because it seems we have focused our attention on the Millennials?  If Gen X had not paved the path, would the Millennials still be who they are today? Maybe the Millennials aren’t the Cool Kids. . .maybe it was the generation before them?

“Baby Boomers are exiting the workforce; a greater number of Millennials will join the workforce. It is estimated that Millennial workers (those born between 1980 and 2000) will comprise one-half of the workforce by 2020.” According to Evren Esen, SHRM-SCP and Director of Survey Programs at SHRM.

Reception

Gen X is middle to upper management today. The middle management workers are coaching and developing the Millennials. Gen X received the responsibility of bridging the gap between Baby Boomers who are now executive management, and Millennials who are the dominant workforce. Millennials were received by other generations with an apprehension because of the expectations and aloofness they exhibit. They are a generation that has not matured enough to define a goal.  As interviews take place, often times you will see the classic Zoolander look loom on a Millennial’s face quietly saying “Who am I?”

Millennials are known for wanting to change the world. Let’s take a moment and acknowledge had prior generations not shared the same desire, we would be stagnant. As it stands, we are not. We are constantly evolving and that is the product of all generations combined, not just Millennials.

Are Millennials special and unique? Yes.  So is everyone else.  As we embark on our journey to recruit talent, it is healthy to take a step back and realize the tactic to recruit Millennials is no different than what has been there all along:

  • Respect, develop and appreciate talent.
  • Drive purpose to your organization.
  • Take the time to embrace change, not fear it.

FOCUS ON ‘HOW’, NOT ‘WHAT’ THEY LEARN

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Employment Retention, Latest News and Articles

Giving high-potential employees the right job-related experiences, and action plans to help learn from them, can boost their performance by up to 30%

By CEB Human Resources | December 15, 2015

From having conversations with clients around the country, they are often surrounding retention problems.  “How do we keep the good?”, “Why is everyone leaving us?” or “What’s it going to keep our people?”. It makes me wonder if they are asking me of their competition’s strategy or if others are having these same problems.  The answer is yes, everyone is.  But the question is not the correct one.  The right question is, how do we retain our “High-potential Employees (HIPOs)? Once this is answered and implemented, your success, revenues and culture should align better because these are the future leaders of your company. ~The Organic Recruiter

High–potential employees (HIPOs) are incredibly valuable to a company. If the firm can keep hold of them and train them in the right way, they are the ones who will one day hold the top jobs and make decisions that will determine the company’s future.

They are 91% more valuable than non-HIPOs in an organization, according to CEB data. So it is important to find which employees are HIPOs – it’s not the same thing as a high-performing employee – and to use objective benchmarking to ascertain whether your HIPOs have sufficiently high potential.

But once the HR team and senior managers have done that, they need to make sure that their green shoots of future success will one day bear fruit.

This is where a lot of HIPO programs – whose aim is to find, retain, and develop HIPOs – go off the rails. Only 5% of programs follow through properly with action plans to develop HIPOs, so it’s no surprise that nearly two-thirds (64%) of HIPOs say they are unhappy with their development.

Spend Less Time in the Classroom

Even when companies do put real focus into HIPO development, most rely on formal classroom or online training. Yet only 10% of what all of us learn comes from this kind of training, according to the widely accepted 70:20:10 model. Most of our knowledge (70%) comes from job-related experiences, and 20% from peers and mentors. Essentially, the model shows that learning is a continuous process.

So HIPOs don’t just need training courses, they need experiences that allow them to practice new skills. Such “learning exposure” needs to be tailored to the individual’s career goals and challenges. It might mean, for instance, taking on a tough project that’s failing and turning it around.

And if HIPO programs get these experiences right, they can improve HIPOs’ knowledge and skills by up to 16%.

Three Ways to Make the Lessons Stick

But there’s another hurdle to overcome. High quality learning won’t necessarily lead to better performing HIPOs. What people really need to know is how to extract what they need from their knowledge to help them perform better.

It helps to think about how you approach something really hard, like learning to play a musical instrument. At first, it’s difficult. You have to concentrate and you perform slowly and deliberately. As you practice, things get easier, especially if you try different approaches and your tutor gives you feedback on what to adjust.

Finally, after yet more practice you find that you no longer even think about playing – you do it naturally.

This is just as true of learning skills in business. Extracting learning requires these three simple elements that should be central to all HIPO development.

  1. Practice: Action plans need to focus employees on the most difficult aspects of a new task and set aside time for these to be done many times until they are done well.
  2. Reflect: Employees need to be encouraged to stop, think about, and even document what went well and what they’ll try differently next time to improve the results.
  3. Get feedback: Action plans should include asking others to rate employees’ performance and its effect on their work. Encourage them to get feedback from multiple perspectives.

Giving HIPOs relevant on-the-job experiences that stretch them, and action plans that embed these three elements, leads to performance improvements of up to 30%, according to CEB analysis.

Nearly three-quarters of HIPO programs (generally run by the HR team) are struggling to demonstrate any return. Putting a good development plan in place and being able to quote performance improvements of nearly a third would be a great response when the CFO next asks whether all that “HIPO budget” is worth it.

YOU CAN’T KEEP FAKING IT! 3 WAYS TO FULLY COMMIT TO MAKING SUCCESSFUL CHANGE

Posted on by The Organic Recruiter in Employment Retention, Employment Value Proposition, Latest News and Articles

By Scott Span | February 5, 2016

Often, we talk to customers about their EVP (Employment Value Proposition) or rather why does someone want to work for you and they say…well we are working on that.  I find that when I hear that, they really aren’t working on that and telling stakeholders they’re getting to it. I believe its more paralysis by analysis, therefore perpetuating the problem of why it’s so hard to retain or recruit great talent.  If we keep faking it, we’ll only be fake and employees and job seekers can smell it a mile away ~The Organic Recruiter

Stop faking change! Stop paying it lip service and not taking supporting actions. Commit to change or don’t even bother. Change is hard. I write about it a lot because how you navigate change impacts whether you will succeed or fail.

It doesn’t need to be costly or painful

Because change is hard, all too often organizations fake change. That means this: They expect change to happen in an environment where they are unwilling to commit to the support needed to make the change a success – unwilling to change processes, culture, strategy and the way they work.

Sounds counter-intuitive, right?

It is. And it’s costing your organization productivity, performance and profit.

Organizational problems are linked together, and change in one area often impacts other areas. New business initiatives, new technology, new processes and procedures, leadership changes – all require new behaviors and ways of doing things.

Organizational change is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it has to be painful or costly. So how do you stop faking change?  First you need to acknowledge how you’re faking change before you can fix it.

You really gotta walk the walk

Communication is a key part of managing change. Are you really providing supporting processes, structures, and culture for open and honest communication? Are you sending the right messages to the right audiences at the right time?

And is everyone inside the organization – from the executives down to the interns – aware of the changes, how it will impact them, and can contribute towards making the change a success?

If not, then you’re faking change. Stakeholders can tell when they’re getting lip service and it does have a negative impact on commitment. Walk the walk and lead the change effort by example.

But, it’s how we’ve always done it

Culture is the way work gets done around here.  One of the hardest parts about causing positive change is changing the status quo – how things have always been done. But you have to change if you want to be successful. You’ve got to commit to the new way – fully.

If the leaders aren’t willing to change their behaviors, or work to change the behaviors of others to support the change, then how do you expect the change effort to be successful? Your job as the leader is to lead.

You MUST make the time to be the face of the change and prioritize engaging with stakeholders. That includes leading in changing the culture if needed to support a new way of doing things.

Fix broken processes

Change in one area often impacts other areas. This requires revamping or doing away with old processes or creating new processes to support the change. You can’t keep trying to use old processes designed to support the old way of doing things and expect a new result. You should do a detailed process inventory and analysis so you have an accounting of your processes, identify which processes need attention, which may need to be created, and then communicate the changes to the team – and train them how to follow them.

The moral of the story is this: You can fake change all you want, but if you really want positive change to be a success, lip service won’t cut it. You must commit to a new way of doing things.