Recruiting Animal

You Can't Tell a Book By Its Cover

Tony Blair's sister-in-law went on a group protest to Gaza.

Interviewed there, she claimed that "conditions in Gaza were worse than those in Darfur, where an estimated 400,000 have been killed since 2003. She also compared Gaza to a concentration camp".

Yet she was photographed by BBC looking healthy and happy in a well-stocked grocery store.

No one expects Gaza to be a paradise right now but comparisons with Darfur and Nazi camps warn you that this person, while she looks and speaks like a normal, modern, educated woman, is a bit flighty.

I post this not to publicize matters in the middle east but to point out something about candidates.

Pose as a career consultant to sell candidates on jobs

Margaret Graziano says:
If you act like a career consultant, candidates will trust you.

So, forget about the job you are trying to fill for 45 minutes and get to know the candidate well. Just like a career consultant would. Then have a great sell.

Star Candidate Blows It

David Brooks makes Obama's errors look worse than I thought.

It was inevitable that the period of “Yes We Can!” deification would come to an end. It was not inevitable that Obama would now look so vulnerable.

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. But....

....the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics.

Key Traits of a Productive Sales Person

Skills
1. Recognize when the customer needs assistance
2. Active Listening to discover customer needs;
    ask questions before pitching a solution
3. Recognize Buying Signals; knowing when to close and when not to

Personality
4. Emotional Resilience: able to recover from rejection;
    not take things personally
5. Perseverance: able to keep focusing on your goals
    when the success rate is low
6. Self Starter: can work in an unstructured environment;
    don't need someone telling you what to do and how to do it
7. Mastering Luck: recognition that you have to put yourself
    in the right position to get lucky
8. Culture Match: share the values and behaviour of your company;
    otherwise you won't be happy

Source: Selling Power

Aging Boomers Desirable Candidates?

According to Kathleen Begley, geezers born between 1945 and 1960 are going to be hot candidates by 2013 because the boomers don't have anyone to replace them.

Why Boomers aren't losers:

Common belief has it that once you're 50 you have a closed mind. Apparently, however, that's not necessarily true.

Workers in their 50s, 60s, and 70s don't need time for child care. But they do want time off for leisure activities. So they might be best as seasonal employees wintering in Florida.

White-collar baby boomers are computer literate. They're just not completely up to date on the latest web 2.0 applications.

Candidates Who Lie

What do the generations have in common? They all lie.
Here's Hillary lying about Bosnia. (It's pretty funny)

And here's Hitch on Obama's lies about his church not being controversial and not being aware of his pastor's odd views.

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed

And here's The Chicago Tribune revealing that Barack's youth was not quite the way he presented it in his memoir. He claimed, for instance, that he became fluent in the Indonesian language in six months when, in fact, he struggled with it the entire time he lived there.

It's Good To Hire Boomerangs

Because they already know the score.

A Boomerang is someone who worked at your company before, left, and wants to return.

Jenny Klimas argues that companies should make a special effort to attract them. Why? Because they already know everything about the firm and you know everything about them.

She claims that they are going to be very loyal after having discovered that the grass is not greener on the other side. But, of course, this might simply be a marriage of convenience.

Intelligence vs Accomplishment

Exceptional intelligence is not enough to explain exceptional accomplishment. Qualities such as imagination, ambition, perseverance, and curiosity are decisive in separating the merely smart from the highly productive.

-- Charles Murray, Commentary Magazine

Sales-people Have A Conflict Orientation

Super-Salesman Silverman Speaks.

Animal: Now, Craig, yesterday when we were having our chummy conversation, you said, that when you teach adults you try to get them to remember what it was like to be a kid because kids refuse to take no for an answer.

What you're saying is that a real salesperson has a conflict-oriented view of the world. And I want you to know that I agree. After all, isn't one of the most profound maxims in selling: "The sale begins when the customer says no."?

That speaks volumes about what the sales person is thinking. She goes to work in the morning looking for a fight. Not a mean fight. But, all the same she's ready to rumble. Isn't that true, Craig?

Craig Silverman: Yeah, we could hire the Girl Scouts if we were just going to make calls and everybody is goes, "Yeah, send me three" and there's no sales talk involved. Good salespeople have to meet "No's" and objections and see them as potential buying signals and get excited by the thrill of the hunt.

Animal: The hunt. They go out to fight with people. They are different than the average guy. Isn't that true?

Craig: It really is. Top sales people are often the number one earning people in the company and it's because that job is really hard.

So what happens is, Animal, people want to be in a high earning sales role but the truth is that getting into the heat of the battle for most people is a nauseating experience. I have seen people get physically ill from getting into a sales chair and trying to either cold call or convince somebody to do something. So, it does take a special breed and part of that is baked into you. It's in the genes.

McDonald's Employees Follow Orders

Unbelievably Weird.

A man posing as a policeman has been calling McDonald's restaurants for years getting people to remove clothing. Recently, the victim was a girl he accused of stealing.

Summers, 51, [the manager] conceded later that she had never known Ogborn to do a thing dishonest. But she nonetheless led Ogborn to the restaurant's small office, locked the door, and -- following the caller's instructions -- ordered her to remove one item of clothing at a time, until she was naked....

On Nov. 30, 2000, the caller persuaded the manager at a McDonald's in Leitchfield, Ky., to remove her own clothes in front of a customer whom the caller said was suspected of sex offenses.

The caller promised that undercover officers would burst in and arrest the customer the moment he attempted to molest her, said Detective Lt. Gary Troutman of the Leitchfield Police Department.

Courier-Journal via The National Post