Hiring Rainmakers Is No Picnic

The topic of the month is discernment. I’m putting a focus on the ways that we as recruiters filter candidates, because ultimately this is what we’re paid to do.

Hiring “A” players seems to be every executive’s dream, but the actual ability to hire the best is hampered by our recruiting processes, our salary packages, and all too often, the candidates themselves. We’ve all heard (and probably experienced) the stories of top, top producers who moved from a company for a big fee and salary increase, yet never produced a single sale, much less the hoped for mega-accounts that make careers.

For hiring cultures trained to believe that past performance is predictive of future success (I think those words are actually tattooed on the eyelids of regional managers in the staffing world), the failure of the rainmaker is a baffling, but common occurrence. She hasn’t written much in the last year, but Terri’s Take On Hiring Rainmakers is a very good blog on the efforts of hiring “A” Players. It turns out that the best salespeople are only the sum of their parts, and those parts are made up of the company infrastructure.

What does that mean? It means that top salespeople are often successful because of their support staff. Remove them from their cozy and familiar environment, and they never again win the Gold Circle Award (or whatever it is your company uses to award people).

Our goal at KeenAlighnment is training recruiters to look past tired cliches and “hunch” recruiting. We want you to be confident in your choices, relying on expertise and not prayer when you send over a candidate. Terri’s Take is exactly the kind of attitude we look for.