What predictive signs can I gather from looking at a sales manager resume?

When you hire the right person for a job, you will invest a lot of time, money and energy into helping them become a great employee and asset to your company. When you hire the wrong person for the job, you will invest a lot of time, money and energy into them and they will still always be the wrong person for the job.

Employee attrition is one of the more costly items on any companies P&L.  It costs to advertise for the job, even if you use the Internet and it costs a lot if you use a recruiter. It costs you time for training and their learning curve before they can be a productive employee. You pay for  insurance and taxes. Sometimes it costs you to send them to training.

One company I worked for paid a recruiter thousands of dollars, then sent me for 5 weeks of training out of state. I calculated it cost them almost $20,000 to hire and train me before I ever was a productive employee.  And then imagine if I had quit after only a few months (I didn't) .  They are left with no leadership (it was upper management), the hiring process again, the training process again, and many times you loose other staff because of management changes.

Then there are the hidden costs -- the customer who no longer purchases from your company because their favorite rep is no longer with you, or worse now works for the competition; the cost of worker disatisfaction or lack of productivity because of no oversight or managment or just plain fear they may loose their job when the new boss comes in.

Even at the entry level jobs, if you loose an employee who greets customers and helps them choose merchandise or if you are now understaffed on the sales floor, you loose sales. And then the person who calls hears a busy, overworked, cranky person who puts them on hold for too long. And then you loose that customer.  It is this kind of loss that is not easily calculated but is very real.

I think my point is clear -- it is very expensive to hire and making a good decision based on a sales manager resume can be daunting, especially if you have never had any training in what to REALLY look for.

I work both sides of this problem: I teach people how to get the jobs they want with carefully worded resumes, great interviewing skills and preparation. On the other side, I work with a company called Predictive Index that helps companies profile the job and the potential employee, trains management on how to use this tool and then how to know if you are really hiring the right person.

But lets say you don't have this tool or the training or background to help you profile and read people, see the personality fit or not for a particlar job...how do you know ?

First, lets establish a few guidelines.   You don't want to hire a sales manager to be your accountant.  He or she should be outgoing and gregarious, like to help people, a good quick decision maker and a big picture thinker.  Someone once used this example. If I was the cashier and was counting out the money at the end of the day and the count was off by 65 cents, I would reach in my purse and pull out 2 quarters, a dime and a nickel and call it a day.  Now, the person that you want to hire as your accountant sees that 65 cents error as a problem and goes over the paperwork and counts again and again to find the mistake.

So before you even look at a sales manager resume you need to know what the job requires.  We know it requires good people skills, good persuaion skills, intelligence, fast thinking, ability to get along with many types of people, abilty to LEAD a team (not just be the boss, because in Sales Management most of the sales  are done by someone else and the manager has to have the skill to get people to want to work for him or her.)

These are just the "skill sets" that you should be looking for but what do you look for on the sales manager resume?

Look at education. Did they finish college; at least you know they can commit to 4 years.  Did they study history or communication or business. History is great, but how will it help them understand how to manage a sales team?

Look at job history.  We have all been let go or changed our minds about a job, but if they have 6 jobs in 10 years, maybe they have issues you don't need.

Ask for references of people who have worked for them not just who they worked for, and then make that call. Know how to ask what kind of a boss they were. Do they motivate mostly with the carrot or the stick?

Ask them how they motivate  staff and how they handle a team. Ask them to give you an idea of how they would increase your sales tomorrow.  Any good sales manager would have checked you out enough to know where they might make a differnce. Even if you don't agree, if they have ideas, that is good .

One of the biggest mistakes is to think that the person who is the best sales person is also going to be a great sales manager. Sometimes it is true, but not always. You need a different mindset to lead and motivate people to work for you then the person who sees all sales as a competition and wants to make sure they are always the winner!

If you truly are not good at interviewing and reading people, then get help. I was once interviewed by 6 people in the same company. One right after the other. Maybe it was an endurance test, but by the time they were done , they knew me and I knew I wanted to work there.  To this day I am pretty sure that one of them was the janitor and they just wanted to see how I would handle it.

Lastly, there are lots of aids and tools you can use, as I said. I work with one that I believe is one  of the best, oldest and most well respected. The small investment a company makes in a good product that helps them profile their potential employees AND matches it to the job skills necessary is far and away worth the cost when you see how much it costs to replace a bad hire.