In the 2000 film, “The Family Man,” Nicolas Cage’s character, Jack Campbell, finds himself in an alternate universe. In it, he tries (among other things) to win his way into a job with a Wall Street M&A firm, P.K. Lassiter. In “real” life, Campbell is the president of P.K. Lassiter, but this glimpse into an alternate reality transforms him into a tire salesman from New Jersey. Stripped of title and position, with only an E.F. Hutton internship on his resume, Campbell has few tools to legitimately win a position with the firm, and must talk his way onto the ground floor of the company. Here is an excerpt from his legendary pitch.
Jack Campbell: “Business is business. Wall Street, Main Street. It’s all a bunch of people getting up in the morning, trying to figure out how they’re going to send their kids to college. It’s just people, and I know people.
“You have two great loves in your life,” he tells Lassiter, “your horses and this company. And you’re a man who prides himself in finding talent in unusual places.”
Peter Lassiter: “How would you know that?”
Jack Campbell: “Because I’m here. I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to get this job. I’ll start wherever I have to start. I’ll park cars if I have to. The biggest part of judging character is knowing yourself, and I know this: I can do this job. I can. Give me a chance, Peter. I won’t let you down.”
The Hollywood treatment aside, perhaps the days of chance meetings and job opportunities starting from impromptu conversations have all but vanished. The film was shot prior to the proliferation of online job resources and social media outlets. The web has enabled job hunters to ferret out employment positions anywhere in the country, or the world for that matter. Hunters can rely on LinkedIn, Monster, Indeed, Glassdoor and other countless services that align companies with prospective employees, utilizing countless tools that provide insight into potential matches.
In shrinking the job-hunting process, these tools have also raised the degree of difficulty for job seekers. It’s not out of the ordinary for companies to receive hundreds of applications for a single job posting. Employers have resorted to using software that scans resumes and cover letters for key words that can eliminate a lion’s share of applicants before a pair of human eyes comes into play. From an employer’s standpoint, it allows firms to cut to the chase quicker to find the handful of candidates who are legitimate prospects.
So, has technology taken the teeth out of old-fashioned, people-judging tactics? We’ve canvassed a number of office technology dealerships to gauge the processes they utilize to recruit and hire quality employees, as well as the challenges they face maintaining their most valuable players.
Employees Know Best
While Eakes Office Solutions of Grand Island, NE, relies on online sites such as LinkedIn and Indeed—not to mention traditional newspaper advertisements—to scout out new talent. But perhaps its strongest go-to medium is referrals from current employees, according to Kevin Fries, human resources manager.
We drill pretty deep into what type of person they are from an integrity standpoint and work ethic
Kevin Fries, Eakes Office Solutions
Kevin Fries,
Eakes Office Solutions
“Our current employees know what type of person it would take to work at Eakes, and understand best who would be an ideal fit from a cultural standpoint,” he said. “They need to live the same core values we live as a company. Beyond that, because we have 14 locations across the state of Nebraska, we have different challenges with what works. In some areas, we can use local colleges to help us find people, and in other parts of the state, traditional newspaper ads work well.”
Fries believes Eakes has a fairly rigorous interviewing process. The typical candidate has a minimum of two interviews with various personnel at the dealership, which also relies on pre-employment screening and testing. When the final candidates have been selected based upon technical skills, education and background, the cultural fit is generally the final piece that often separates one person from the pack.
“We drill pretty deep into what type of person they are from an integrity standpoint and work ethic,” Fries added. “Are they trying to be the best they can be? We’re just trying to dig as deep as we can to get the right person. It’s important that they’re going to work their tail off, yet still have fun and conduct themselves with a high level of integrity.”
Chris Taylor,
Fisher’s Technology
Personal relationships are also a strong source of candidate discovery for Fisher’s Technology of Boise, ID. CEO Chris Taylor ranks employee networks atop the list for finding talent, but the pipeline can be fortified by individuals who attend company events, including social, charitable and educational outings. These settings provide potential candidates, as well as Fisher’s executives, a chance to learn more about one another in a natural atmosphere.
Interestingly, Taylor ranks traditional career search tools and staffing agencies as a “distant third” choice for finding potential candidates. He prefers to target people who possess strong values that mesh with Fisher’s way of doing business.
“If someone has a positive attitude, is driven to make customers extremely happy, is humble and wants to win, they are likely a fit,” he said. “Certainly, some job-specific skill level is required after that, but we can train skills. We can’t train attitude and values.”
Finding Top Choices
Emmy Georgeson, imageOne
Geographies can often dictate the degree of difficulty in finding key personnel, whether a dealer is seeking their next sales superstar, a new service tech or admin staff. One of the realities learned from fishing in the talent pool is that many of the best and brightest are gainfully employed, notes Emmy Georgeson, head of Recruitment & Development for imageOne of Oak Park, MI. The dealer sees many candidates who are unemployed or unhappy with their current jobs, while others are young and lacking the desired experience for a position. Although imageOne handles hiring within, they may reach out to recruiting firms for extra help with sales and service technician openings.
The challenge in retention is that it takes consistent, diligent attention and understanding. It also takes great listening, open mindedness, great feedback and a commitment to their development.
Emmy Georgeson, imageOne
Even with the difficulties in finding optimal candidates, imageOne is uncompromising in its standards for seeking potential team members. “Our hiring process is ‘Thorough, Thoughtful and Collaborative,’ ” Georgeson said. “All of our recruiting efforts are based on the core values of imageOne: Open and Honest, A Passion for the Extraordinary, Flawless Execution and Thinking Like a Visionary.
“Our recruiting process is strong because we start with a clear understanding of the position we’re recruiting for,” she added. “We understand the role and responsibilities, but more importantly, the core competencies required for that person to have success in the job. Then we note how we’re going to measure their success.”
One of the more unique aspects of imageOne’s application process is its requirement that applicants write a series of short answers on how they embrace the dealer’s core values in their everyday lives. This provides imageOne with insight into the applicant that can’t be found on a resume, and showcases their written communication skills in a spontaneous manner.
That sets the stage for an involved interview process that includes a telephone screening, manager interview, executive interviews with the CEO and/or president, as well as talks with two or three other team members. Georgeson notes that a candidate can go through as many as six interviews prior to being hired. These interviews are complemented by online assessments, such as the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Test and the Kolbe A assessment, which examine an individual’s ability to digest and understand situations and information and a person’s instinctive method of operation, respectfully. Sales candidates are also asked to shadow a sales rep for half a day.
“It’s a very reciprocal process,” Georgeson said. “They need to meet as many people as they can and experience our business and culture, and we need to see them in all those different situations so that we can make this decision together.”
Much like its contemporaries, Fraser Advanced Information Systems of West Reading, PA, finds its best resource for new hires lies in employee referrals. However, the company revamped its referral program in 2017, which has led to not only an increase in recommendations, but a spike in new hires through that avenue as well.
Alexandra Goodman, Fraser AIS
Fraser also relies on job boards and online tools, to a lesser extent, notes Alexandra Goodman, HR manager. But it is the referrals that have enabled the dealership to keep head-count pace as the firm continues to grow.
Assessment Tools
Goodman points out that Fraser’s interview process is intended to onboard individuals who can best move the company forward as opposed to simply filling a cubicle. The initial engagement is a phone conversation that mutually determines whether the opportunity and the candidate mesh. The second stage is an in-person interview and the completion of an Interest Analysis, as well as a DiSC personality profile assessment, which yields where the candidate might best fit within the organization.
“After a meeting with upper management, a final role and compensation review with a verbal offer is discussed prior to a formal written offer being sent,” Goodman said. “At every level, our hiring managers are looking for candidates who can impact Fraser’s key drivers and fit with our core competencies.”
Fraser is careful not to bog down the process. The unemployment level in Pennsylvania was 4.8 in March of this year, which is higher than the 3.8 national average through April. That ratchets up the competition for candidates who are interviewing with multiple companies. “Urgency in timing and the quality of the courtship are important to our process,” Goodman pointed out.
One of the key challenges for Fisher’s Technology is ensuring that internal candidates who are promoted have the particular skill sets to adequately fulfill the role of a manager, for instance. Taylor notes that a great sole contributor doesn’t necessarily make for an ideal leader of people. Such a promotion could subtract a stellar sole contributor while adding a mediocre (or worse) manager.
“Our challenge is to identify natural leaders and empower them to lead,” he said. “For the rest of our amazing people who deep down don’t want to manage others, we need to help them grow in skill set, add challenges, and enhance career satisfaction without becoming a manager.”
Extended Engagements
The key to employee retention for Eakes Office Systems is understanding an employee’s internal driver—and finding out what makes them click. “We’re focusing on engagement with our workforce,” Fries said. “The key to finding a good employee and keeping them for the long haul is to make sure they’re engaged in what they’re doing in their job. That’s one of the biggest challenges, because each employee is different, and we need to drive that engagement toward all the employees.”
Georgeson believes retention is much less of a problem for imageOne than finding candidates. Once the dealer is able to lock into a team member, regardless of the role, they’re generally on board for the long term. imageOne hasn’t turned over a sales person in at least three years, despite growing its rep bullpen. Overall tenure lengths range from five to 22 years.
“The challenge in retention is that it takes consistent, diligent attention and understanding,” Georgeson said. “It also takes great listening, open mindedness, great feedback and a commitment to their development. For us, it’s not a challenge, because it’s what we do. Our top sales team member has been here 22 years and it’s because of the culture that we offer.”
Keith Roher,
CEO/Managing Partner,
Next Level Impacts
Yet, despite all of your experience with sales reps at every mile marker of the competency map, using gut instincts to choose your next wonder boy or golden girl may not be the best course of action. Keith Roher, CEO and managing partner of Next Level Impacts, an advisory firm that consults with dealers on issues ranging from MPS, BPO, productivity and recruiting, has been down this road himself. The former president and partner of Zeno Office Solutions, Roher is well versed on the topic of why office technology dealerships struggle with the frustrations, and the inevitable turnover, in their quest to bring home and maintain top sales performers.
“The number-one issue is expectations. Dealers need to be able to define expectations up front in the interview process,” he said. “In a 2016 Gartner report that asked reps why they left, it wasn’t because of money. The top reason was expectations and the second was poor management. As a sales manager or vice president of sales, we have a budget to hit and a head-count target to achieve. In order to get to the budget, we make decisions on hiring reps using our gut instincts—which I’ve done as well—but we need to move beyond just that first impression.”
Setting Expectations
Expectations often aren’t met simply because dealers fail to paint a true picture of the roles these reps undertake. Successful firms do a better job of breaking down the rep’s assignment, including the percentage of time spent farming and hunting, and more accurately convey what is expected.
“We sometimes gloss over that, because we have a tinge of desperation,” Roher noted. “We like the candidate up front—they look and sound good and have the talk track down. But once you get them into hand-to-hand combat mode, they don’t get the job done. So we turn them over.”
Roher firmly believes that developing reps is the best way to ensure that a dealer’s best-and-brightest sales performers will remain on board for the long term. The key here is that the reps need to feel like they’re being developed. That starts with the VP of sales and the sales manager staying on message and not contradicting one another. The moment a sales manager goes off script on an aspect that was driven home during the training period, it will invariably lead to frustration for the rep.
So why do we struggle when it comes to gut instincts? It’s not an easy answer. Competition for strong salespeople is through the roof; the job market has improved, and companies are battling for the best of the best. Some candidates hone in on salaries and don’t understand the full value of the compensation package in comparison to positions in other industries. Drawing an apples-to-apples comparison may be misleading.
“It’s just a different, more complex sales individual that we’re hiring today,” Roher observed.
Sourcing Candidates
Roher has sampled all of the credible online resources for hiring and feels that LinkedIn, by far, should be the platform of choice. It is the perfect table-setter—complete with resume, photo, recommendations and connections— providing a holistic view from which the dealer/recruiter can build a conversation with the candidate. The extent to which a candidate takes great care in building that profile also yields insight into the person’s diligence.
On the flip side, the easier it is to reach out to employers, the greater the risk of saturation applications. When Roher posts openings for positions, he estimates that 90 percent of the people are wrong for the job. On top of that, roughly 70 percent of that group blasted out their resumes to multiple job posts. That becomes evident when Roher asks a given candidate what attracted him or her about the job, as they tend to fumble their way through an answer or (giving consolation points for honesty) flat-out admit that they don’t remember what they sent. That frustrates Roher to no end.
The best candidates, and the ones Roher relishes approaching, are the employed stars who aren’t in the market for a new job. Herein lies the real essence of recruiting.
“I find that the diamonds in the rough are the people who are not expecting to know who I am or why I’m sending them a message, because they’re not expecting a message from me,” he said. “I feel I have a compelling story, a strategy that I use. Everyone responds to me—not usually with the answer that I want—but at least we get a dialogue going. It’s a courtship. When a client provides the demographics it’s seeking in a hire, those are the people I’m going to focus on.”
Full Compensation Picture
It is important for hiring managers to paint a complete picture of the benefits that are available to the top performers: Annual contests that offer Rolex watches, high-end electronics and president’s club trips to exotic destinations. Those are the kind of enticements that add sparkle to the eyes of top performers. And candidates will beam at the thought of a 75-cent employer contribution for every dollar invested in the 401K program. Outlining the full breadth of the compensation, like clearly articulating the expectations of the job, will inevitably lead to more impactful hiring.
One area that also concerns Roher is the practice of paying annuities to sales representatives. In theory, he feels it’s not a bad idea for smaller dealerships in the sub-$10 million range. “I don’t want my reps waking up in the morning, feeling that they don’t have to bust their ass as hard today because they know they have $2,500 coming in this month because of the annuity. Some owners might then pay a smaller percentage if the reps aren’t consistently hitting their number, but I still have a fundamental issue with it.”
Journey to Onboard
One bit of advice Roher would offer dealers and their hiring team is to tighten up the interview process. Two weeks is the magic number from initial connection to job offer, and he feels many dealers would be well served to remove superfluous steps or consolidate the process. Roher can appreciate the need for multiple screeners, and he advocates a “cooling-off” period between interviews to see if the second impression of the candidate meshes with that gleaned from the initial meeting. But if the process drags out for a month or longer, the greater the risk for losing the candidate to a more-expedient employer.
“One thing we did a good job with at Zeno was, before we hired anyone, we prepared them the night before they were to come into the office by giving them a list of accounts they would call the next day,” Roher explained. “That allowed us to see what kind of research they would do on the accounts. The next day, we’d have our manager make a few calls in front of the candidate so that he or she could hear the cadence of the conversation. Then we’d give the person a short script and have them do a call. In doing this, you can quickly smoke out the candidates who are going to embrace it.”
Finally, it is important for dealers to employ a sales-management-development component to complement its sales coaching and development. “A lot of companies think that teaching or developing managers to recruit is a waste of time, because they need to be in the field,” Roher said. “I totally disagree with that. Especially today, with social media, it doesn’t take a lot of leadership’s time to spend 30 minutes early in the morning or late in the evening, firing off quick little LinkedIn InMails, but there’s an art to it. In addition to benchmark development and leadership development, part of the subset of leadership development should be recruiting and how they’re doing it, instead of just relying on an in-house or outsourced recruiter.”
