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Can you be just too good at getting jobs?

Can that have a negative effect on your career as an IT sales person.

When it comes to working with recruiters can you be too placeable? too good a candidate?

I believe its possible and I’ll explain how and why.

I met with a candidate the other day who was really great. He was the right age, Had worked for the some of the right companies, had some good p60s in his portfolio and came across very well when we interviewed him. It was clear he would be very good at interviews and we were right. Upon closer examination of his CV it was clear there had been a couple of “mistakes” in their and so I pursued the line of question as to how and why. After all, here was a very talented and bright individual with charm, charisma and likeability factor. How could he have got it so wrong?

We picked one move in particular and examined the circumstances around his joining the company.

He met three recruiters who were very impressed by him and his CV. They got to work and each of them sent him to some interviews. After a couple of weeks he had 6 job offers, a perfect situation and he sat down to peruse them and make up his mind. He turned 3 of them down and was left with a shortlist of three prospective employers. That was when the fun and games began. Each offer was split between a different recruiter. As a senior professional he was aware that each of the recruiters had a lot riding on the outcome and each began to sell their socks off. He couldn’t get a genuine unbiased opinion and so he stopped talking to the recruiters. He turned a job down and the company “revised” their offer. It wasn’t enough and he finally settled on a job letting the other employer know at which point they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse -  it was way in excess of the company he had decided upon. This offer was extremely attractive and he went for it.

When he got to the job things weren’t as they were initially feted. The levels of support were far less than promised. The product was aged and the expectations of the management team were un realistic. The job lasted 5 months before it was agreed that things weren’t working out for any of the people concerned and he left. He was “resigned” from his position with a months money and a thank you.

So how can being too good at interviews have caused the problem. I’ll explain.

1. Some recruiters like people that are good at getting jobs and whose CV proves it. If they are good at getting jobs then they are good at being fees and therefore they tend to get a lot of attention, almost always too much attention in relation to their skill set and so its not uncommon  to see an interview megastar have an extremely mixed skill set. That’s because year after year successive recruiters have identified the easy placement and sent him to lots of jobs outside of his core skillset and comfort zone where he has beaten all comers over and over.

2. The candidate often loses the ability or the opportunity to forge a deep relationship with a recruiter and get the advice he needs as the recruiter is under pressure to place a very placeable candidate that he knows is split in several directions and therefore the candidate ends up a piece of meat in the feeding frenzy, or even worse still the smart recruiter surreptitiously qualifies out of the campaign and lets the others kill themselves over him.

 3. Its easy to justify to your boss a hiring decision by hiring the candidate who is obvious and likeable. When the decision goes wrong a hiring manager can abdicate responsibility by pointing out that “everyone loved the guy when we interviewed him”.

So what’s the remedy to the conundrum?

1. Work with fewer recruiters and build relationships with those small few to make sure that they focus on your interests and not just the competition. Go out of your way to make sure they remember that you are a human being with a soul and a family and not just a "walking fee” or as one recruiter I know likes to refer to it a “UNIT”. Let them get to know you. You cant treat someone like a piece of meat when you have a decent relationship with them and like them, in fact you are more likely to want to really provide a  solution to their problem.

2. Have a look at what you are really good at and undertake a detailed analysis of your current situation and personal needs.If a recruiter won’t meet you face to face if given the opportunity then walk away. If they take less than 5 minutes to discuss your needs then walk away. If they don’t examine the genuine pain points in your career at that point then walk away. A good recruiter should match jobs to you based on your environmental and behavioural requirements as well as your current skills and capabilities. They should also work hard to understand your personal values and goals, if they don’t then they are matching to the fact that your are highly placeable and likeable and not to your needs and pains.

3. Document your needs and problems and make sure you distinguish them from your wants. When a recruiter comes back to you with an interview it should MEET YOUR NEED and you should assess it on that basis. You should not assess it on how exciting it is and how leading edge the technology unless that is one of your needs. Invariably when we interview in depth we find that actually peoples needs are often far from sexy company, sexy technology yet the most placeable and likeable, “easy to hire” candidates often end up in those jobs and have tumultuous careers as a result.

4. Be aware that you are easy to hire and easy to place and plan ahead.

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One of my favourite tunes of the 80’s. A track that really heralded that 80’s synth sound and that was massively influential on some of my favourite bands at the moment was a song that popped into my head during a recent new candidate interview that happened here at IRC. The tune came into my mind about half way through the interview.

I had been pretty excited about interviewing the chap when I nipped out for a sandwich. I had read the CV and it was absolutely superb. It read like a whose who of the industries major corporations. It had everything, Stability , progression, success as demonstrated by some significant (several £250k+ p60s) pay days and so I was justifiably excited about meeting the chap.

How disappointed I was.

1. Visual impact: My candidate looked like a “Grey Man” . Grey Suit, White shirt , dark tie. He was almost too corporate – his overall look was that of an accountant, a lawyer or possibly an undertaker. Whilst I don’t advocate over dressing or dressing to be noticed there was no visual impact at all.

2. Personality :  As I sat in front of this chap I couldn’t help but feel that the life force had been sucked from the chap. It was as if he had met with a dementor on a dark night several years ago and had never really recovered.

3. Track record: I couldn’t knock his P60’s and “successes” but when I really drilled into his track record I was confused.  I couldn’t get to grips with where his value add had been to the jobs he had done and some of the deals he had won. In a number of his deals I couldn’t help but feel that he had won business because of the companies he had worked for and not necessarily because of his sharpness, skill and professionalism as a sales person. I was particularly perturbed when drilling into his management career -  there were great numbers in the track record but a lot of the sales growth was clearly down to the fact that he had worked in some buoyant sectors, supported by large recruitment budgets, in particular public sector.

So what’s my point?

My point is that a lot of candidates walk into our offices, fixated, possibly even obsessed with starting a life at a big corporate or vendor and to be fair that can be a very exciting route to go down but I want to counsel that it is NOT the only route to a great career in fact actually I think it is the opposite. It is a guaranteed route to the denigration of your own personal brand and value proposition in favour of relying on the brand and value proposition of the big corporate.

I think if I had met this chap 15 years ago I would have met a dynamic aggressive assertive intense salesman with the world at his feet. Instead I met a grey man who had the life sucked out of him by corporate political infighting and life in middle management where he had taken all the pressure with none of the power to truly make decisions and influence outcomes. He had earned some good money as a cog in the big machine but by becoming one of the masses had made himself practically unplace-able at a pretty early age.

Personally I prefer to see a better mix of environments on a CV as a career progresses it’s essential to be able to prove that you can “street-fight” and make things happen in smaller environments as well as proving that you have played for the bigger clubs. What I counsel people must not do is fade to grey.

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I had a really interesting conversation the other day with a candidate who rang me for some advice and I thought I would share it here.

The individual concerned had been to the pub with some mates in the industry who had told him that he should be capitalising on a recent seam of success in his sales career. he had enjoyed two consecutive quarters of really smashing target, earned some good commission and was full of confidence. His friends who were looking out for him after some previously challenging times told him he should use the success as a springboard to bigger and better things at this point in his career.

When he called I went through my usual qualifying routine and established where he stood in what Miller Heiman refer to as a mode. I’m usually looking to establish whether the candidate is in “growth mode”, “trouble mode”, “even keel” or “overconfident” and we established that to all intents and purposes he was in even keel mode and at best growth. A favourite question of mine when talking to people in these situations is to ask the person to imagine a scale of +5 to –5 with +5 being “I love my job” and –5 being “get me the hell out of here” . This chap said he was at a zero which usually is a good indicator of classic “even keel” mode and for me qualifies out of working with the candidate.

So why?

Lets take a look at basic human behaviour and “buyer” behaviour  and then perhaps come back to our chap above.

What was the last really big purchase you made? why did you make it? what really DROVE that purchase?

If we really get into the nitty gritty of consumer behaviour at an intellectual and academic level which is an enormous topic we’ll find that most big changes and purchases are borne of a “need” which is usually borne of pain of some sort. If as a salesperson you go  back in time through your compendium of great sales you’ll find that MOST were instigated due to the fact that that there was something not quite right with the incumbent technology / supplier / provider that triggered the procurement. I can’t remember the last time a sales person told me a deal story about a client who was perfectly happy with their system / supplier and who was enjoying a terrific return on investment on their original purchase but opted to riskily change suppliers because their mates told them they could get better elsewhere. If their isn’t a problem with the existing solution or supplier then a new supplier is going to have to come up with something outrageous to motivate the client to change and the same goes for sales people.

So just come up with decent jobs and then we’ll move from where we are you cry!!!!

No …..you…..wont.

Not even if I come up with a job at heavensoft technologies working for the big man himself!

Why?

Because there’s more to it than that and as a recruiter who has a marginal OCD problem the stats say that you wont move jobs and that if you do it will be a shocking mistake under those circumstances. Registering with a recruitment consultant (or a good proactive one at least) when you are not entirely ready to move jobs can be a very painful process for all concerned that can prove to be very damaging.

The candidate meets the recruiter who, impressed with his successes gets to work and arranges interviews. The candidate in no pain and in no hurry is hard to please and decides not to go to any interviews and finally acquiesces to go to a couple of interviews that the recruiter organises for him before things get untenable. The candidate who isn’t under too much pressure to move jobs doesn’t prepare as thoroughly or take the process as seriously as the other candidates he is up against who need to move much more and gets his backside kicked in the competition. He loses a smidgen of confidence, as does the recruiter who realises the candidate isn’t “up for it” and decides to work on someone else. The candidate goes to the pub and tells his mates that he looked around the market and there was nothing decent out there and then proceeds to “get his head down” for about an other 18 months. He almost certainly stays longer than he ought because he timed his run at the market badly.

The other case scenario is that the candidate meets the recruiter who is impressed with his successes and gets to work on the case. The recruiter comes up with a client who are a bit desperate and see a salesman on form working for a competitor and throw A LOT OF MONEY AT IT. The candidate feels great – he has been headhunted and made an offer he couldn’t refuse and proceeds to leave his perfectly acceptable job with which there was nothing intrinsically wrong. A year later he is in pain working for a lesser supplier and having a short gap year on his career.

So what’s my point.

My point is this. If you are thinking of moving roles try the following set of questions.

1. what is hurting me with my current role?

2. Where do I stand on the +5 to –5 continuum? – if you are at less than one in terms of desire to move then stay where you are and go and be nice to your boss. If at 2 or 3 then its time to up your job hunt and 4 or 5 you really need to get it sorted.

3. Who else is affected if I move and what will my moving jobs be like for them?

4.How does moving job fit in with my other goals?

5. How will moving jobs increase my choices?

6. What will happen if I move jobs?

7. what wont happen if I move jobs?

8. What will happen if you don’t get a new job?

9. what wont happen if you don’t get a new job?

Some of these questions are deliberately confusing and well worth thinking through. As we say up here in Yorkshire” If it’s not broke don’t fix it”

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Just a quick note of thanks to Lee Schofield who helped raise £250 for Chrissies quest with his recent referral. Lee introduced us to a partner organisation as a recruiter with whom we successfully made a placement. Thanks Lee!

As you know we are really focussing our efforts on NSPCC in the run up to Christmas so get your thinking hats on for anyone you may know who is looking  for a job or a salesperson and let us know.

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I am really pleased to announce that after a team meeting last night we have decided to support NSPCC as our charity between today and Christmas Eve. We looked at a few different charities and have gone for NSPCC as they are a relevant, important and non political UK charity. We’re really looking forward to supporting them and we’re sure that we’ll raise a significant amount by the time we go home for the Christmas break. We’ve got a few different internal activities planned and the easiest way to raise money is via our referral scheme.

It’s as simple as this.

· Phone in and brief IRC on a genuine live job Vacancy =and we’ll immediately donate £100 to NSPCC.

· Phone in with a lead for either a workable client brief or candidate and we’ll donate 2.5% of the fee to NSPCC upon successful placement.

During August and September we raised about £750 for a local charity called Chrissies quest (Grumpy Mike Price even deigned to jump out of a plane for the cause) and we’re hoping with a more widely known charity to go three times better than that with our efforts between now and Christmas its easy to help and COSTS YOU NOTHING. Other recruiters ask you those questions all the time and give nothing in return so get your thinking hats on!!!

(Successful Placement – client must have paid IRC’s fee in accordance with agreed terms and conditions and candidate must have stayed with the company for more than 8 weeks)

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I had the very disappointing experience today of meeting with an IT sales executive whose career really has gone awry. It was disappointing because over the last few years I’ve seen this particular chap unravel in spectacular fashion and I’m going to tell you the story of how and why it happened.

I’m going to call him Dave to protect the innocent and I’d like to thank him for the honesty and humility with which he approached todays meeting and the decency to allow me to blog about it.

It all started four years ago when we met for the first time. Inward Revenue was very much in its infancy and at the time finding new candidates was quite the challenge. In walks Dave, he had been referred to me by another candidate and was at the very early stages of his job search. He had been working in the VAR channel for a small reseller for 5 years and had been a consistent performer. He was a little but not grossly underpaid and he and I got on very well. He was the perfect candidate in so many respects and so it was of no surprise to anyone when we placed him with a vendor.

Somewhat oddly a week after Dave started his job I met the chap he had replaced who was extremely bitter about the nature of his departure. He felt that the rug had been pulled from him after 2 years of nurturing a number of accounts that were just about to bear fruit in the quarter proceeding his departure. He was furious, he felt that the company had “seen him off” because they didn’t want to pay the commissions he was going to earn. He had had those accounts for two years and had shmoozed, boozed, smoothed, and tended those accounts until they were ready to lay golden eggs.

Dave got the accounts…

And everything that his predecessor had worked on, and I mean everything dropped. …..On top of that Dave worked quite hard and he won a few deals due to his own efforts.

Dave made club. Dave earned 427K before tax . Dave bought a Porsche. Dave bought a Rolex. Dave bought a bigger house. Dave put his kids into private school. Mrs Dave stopped working .Dave had the Midas touch and it was never going to end.

Dave got headhunted by the in house recruiter of another vendor who had heard of his prowess and Dave joined them, after all, the cupboard looked a tad bare at the other place. Dave had a bad start and got canned and came to see me. Dave was on an 85k base a 9k car allowance and had a lifestyle well in excess of that.  I asked Dave a key question in the recruitment process about the cut off point below which he genuinely couldn’t afford to take a job irrespective of how much he wanted the job and he told me that genuinely when he looked at what he needed to earn to open the doors of his house every month it was effectively 85K.

I placed Dave again with a small slightly risky newcomer US vendor on the same basic. After all he had a p60 in his interview portfolio that read 400K+ only 15 months ago so getting a job was never going to be too hard. But the job was. Dave had a bad year and the Americans wanted a lot for the money they were giving him and frankly didn’t feel that inclined to spend on marketing and lead generation when they had paid so much for a superstar salesman. Dave got canned after 9 months.

Dave was in a pickle. He hadn’t changed his champagne lifestyle one little bit despite what was rapidly turning into a lemonade income. He had debt and a bigger mortgage on the same house. The Porsche was a thirsty creature.  He needed money and fast and he NEEDED, that’s right, NEEDED a big basic salary and ideally some guarantees ( even though there was no justifiable basis on which a client should pay them to Dave). Lucky for Dave that another recruiter found another US new entrant vendor , a VC backed business with revolutionary technology . Dave signed up on another massive danger money salary, sold nothing , got canned and came to see me. This time that 400k p60 looked a bit dog eared around the edges. As did Dave, he looked tired. A shadow of his former self to be honest.

Dave has sold the Porsche, He has told his mates that the Prius is part of him and the wife “going green” which I think is a fairly accurate description of how he feels. Dave has “restructured” and finally taken a job in the channel on 50K base with a partner where 9 out of ten sales people earned over 95K last year and he has a good chance of earning selling sensible technology to sensible customers for a sensible employer.

Dave admitted to me that whilst the money and the adulation were fun at the time, that one big year was the worst thing that ever happened to him. He told me over a quiet lunch that it fundamentally altered the fabric of his life and damaged his career enormously. I told Dave that it was something I had seen many times before but couldn’t have pointed out to him at the time because he would have accused me of being a recruiter trying to lower his salary expectations.

Now I’m not advocating that people shouldn’t enjoy their successes. I just want to point out that when the big one comes look out for it and take a big deep breath and be honest with yourself. how much of it was really down to your immeasurable genius and how much of it was bluebird? Be aware that success at that level is as challenging as failure if not more so. It will breed arrogance and stupidity in the most grounded of us whereas failure fuels hunger intensity and when well channelled in the right salesman, a burning desire to win.

Enjoy the money but stay cool. that way you’ll be able to consistently cope with your big years.

Wouldn’t say no to the big year and the Porsche though….

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I’ve  been watching the news over the summer with interest. Murdoch, Gaddafi, Riots and according to the journalistic chicken lickens that work in the city the SKY IS FALLING DOWN……………again and err again. WE’RE ALL DOOMED !!!!. according to the “business writers” we are stuffed, screwed, kaput and knackered and we should all go home and wait in our living rooms until the repo men come for the telly. Don’t bother going to that appointment or closing that deal that’s just coming to fruition because you wont be able to spend the bonus after the apocalypse.

Well I for one am simply not having it and I’ve noticed that neither is anyone else. Yesterday after those poor chaps in the city had a “difficult day at the office” It appears that no one other than the paper they all read actually gave a monkeys. In fact it was nice to see that the ire of the respectable media had turned on the same tabloid idiots that did their best to talk us into and prolong the last recession for as long as possible. Murdoch is bigger news, Lewis moody’s knee is bigger news, Ha! England V Wales is bigger news .

It seems that most of the sane rational folk out there are firstly sick of hearing about the doom and gloom and are secondly finally emerging from the recession. Whilst net unemployment is in perfect equilibrium and we’re not quite recruiting at dot com boom and Millennium bug levels the market is definitely a bit better. Inward revenue have had a really good solid few months and I’m sure there are more to come. Maybe its because we have a great team(we do) and maybe it’s the market but I know that I am a lot more optimistic about the economic outlook.

There was a great piece in business week recently entitled hiring like its 1999 about how competitive the IT sales job market has gone crazy in America and I’m sure that in time it will be the same over here. So I for one am running with the bulls.

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Ahh another day in the heady world of IT sales recruitment draws to a close and its time to reflect on some of the conversations that have taken place today. One in particular has lingered in my mind. It was a conversation I had with a current client who is also a current candidate. Interesting huh? The conversation was about a candidate that I had introduced him to and who he interviewed this morning whilst playing the role of my client. He liked the candidate and was at pains to point out that yet again in this instance we had got the match absolutely spot on in terms of the brief we had been given. His worry was about the fact  that he was leaving or at least intending to leave his job and whether he ought to be interviewing people at all. he was worried that it would be wrong to hire someone and then leave the job shortly thereafter. Now a straw pole on linkedin revealed some very interesting thoughts on the issue ranging from “Your client must stop hiring immediately” to “The guy has a job of work to do for his existing employers and as a professional he needs to act like a pro and perform his duty for his existing employers until the point at which he walks out the door”. In the end we discussed it again and I gave him the following set of “rules” as a conclusion.

1. Are your employers (the hiring managers’) bad people?

2. Intrinsically is the company “rotten”  – are you knowingly and consciously aware that it’s a bad place to work in  a general cultural sense?

3. Intrinsically is the job that you are trying to fill a dud? Is it a highway to hell in which no salesman on earth will succeed?

4. Are the problems in your position separable from the position you are trying to fill?

It was only then that the moral dilemma was solved. My client went on to tell me that actually his employers are nice guys and that he really enjoys that part of the job; the company is well respected in their market and that the product is good. He went on to point out to me that actually whilst he has an underperformer on the patch a good and focussed individual with a will to win could earn a lot of money given the current set of circumstances and that his issues lie with a particular clash of board room personalities that isn’t going to go away.

The conclusion is that we’ve now got an excellent vacancy in the south in the BI market and that we’ve also got a very good sales manager working with us who is looking for a job and that everyone is happy! 

Time for the apprentice – have a nice evening all.

JG

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I worry about beautiful charismatic people in our industry.

Now you might say that it’s sour grapes because after all I am….

A) vertically challenged

B) folicularly challenged

C) charismatically challenged

D) not the best looking of people.

It’s a miracle and a testimony to my salesmanship that I have had the career I’ve had and managed to get mrs Graham to take my name.

So what’s my worry with beautiful people then?

Well beautiful people have a massive advantage in their careers, especially in the early stages. People like nice looking people – add a bit of basic likeability and charisma to that and you have a devastating combination from an employability perspective.Beautiful people get jobs and get hired over less beautiful people and this is a COLD,HARD, FACT.

It doesn’t start to go wrong until the beautiful person gets a bit older. At the start of their career when it’s highly likely that the beautiful person will be involved in a simple, lower level and less complex sell everything is perfect. People not only hire beautiful people more readily but in low involvement procurements they also buy from them so the beautiful person has a super start to their career. They rapidly outgrow the job and decide they are set for bigger and better things. Young and green that they were they listened to that early training and now "know how to sell".

The beautiful people move up the food chain and success comes again – of course it does -  in a mid tier low to medium involvement departmental sale. Those killer looks still do the trick and with a bit of salesmanship they can be devastating. Who needs training? Who needs to upgrade their skills? Not our beautiful person as they are gods gift to selling – they were born to sell. They meet another beautiful person and begin to have more beautiful people; they move house, get a bigger car, decorate and get a loan and so they move jobs because they need a bigger basic salary. Those killer looks “will knock em dead” and off they go except this time it gets harder. They lose a few deals to the short ugly guy in the grey suit from the competition who seemed to be spending all his time with some bloke the beautiful person didn’t know in the account. When they bump into the guy at a trade show and have a coffee he can’t believe that the beautiful person didn’t spot the "fox" in the account. Our beautiful person buys a new suit and does his best. He has a bad year and starts to look around before he is pushed. Hey, we all have a bad year at some point don’t we? The recruiter who has done him so proud so far seems so welcoming and because he has had a bad year and needs a bit of cash gets him a pay rise and amazingly a bigger job than the one he just had. This one doesn’t work out too ( must have been the product). The ugly guy in the north with his silly MBA and sales books must have got all the good leads and so it continues. He’s a bit down in the dumps our beautiful guy so he has a few ginsters sausage rolls too many and now he just isn’t so handsome and his career is in free fall.

I can count on one hand the number of beautiful people that I know who have made it to enterprise level in their careers with a commensurate increase in skill and have thus survived there. Beauty is an advantage – sorry but it is – the real challenge is to grow skills and knowledge with the stratospheric career progression that it can often afford.

I’ll stick with being a beast for now.

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