Cattle Call

At work we're going through another one of those annoying hiring surges. I may have mentioned this in passing, however I'm too lazy to go back and check my own posts.

Even if we didn't have a guy leaving at the end of the month, we'd still be looking to hire two more people.

Bossman gets these kooky ideas in his head that "bigger is better." My personal belief system says small and efficient is the way to go, but hell, it ain't my money.

Our hiring process consists of the following:

1) Running a slew of advertisements on Monster, Careerbuilder, etc.
2) Phone screening all the candidates that seem bright enough to tie their own shoes
3) Calling them in for a personal interview.

That's when things get tricky. Usually at that point people decide that they really don't want to be on the phone all day, especially not speaking to a bunch of gruff VP-level assholes who take such pleasure in tearing salespeople down.

If they make it through the special corporate video and decide they'd like to join our cult, they get corralled my way. I administer one of those trite business math & vocablary exams and make them take a personality assessment. If they're smarter than a carrot and can lie well enough to the personality test to show that they can conform to our extremely lax corporate guidelines, my boss gives them the song and dance about how recruiting is a tough business and blahdiblah.

Needless to say, most people that come through the door thinking they'd make an excellent salesperson doesn't make it through the interview with the same confidence in their skillset. I put five rejection letters in the mail this afternoon.

I think I need to widen my applicant pool somehow.

Posted by Tiffany at November 15, 2005 08:45 PM | TrackBack