John C. Marshall, PhD

From the early 1990s until the new millenium, major advances in communications technology coupled with rapid changes in the job market have kept recruiters in a constant state of change. This has forced large companies that do a lot of recruiting to alter their approach. Managers who recruit have had to acquire additional skills and competencies to attract and contract top associates for field or home office positions. The good news is that the advances in communications have created a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on technology to increase the flow of qualified candidates.

To capitalize on changing technologies, financial services sales organizations must learn to adapt and expand their recruiting strategies by taking advantage of all the marketing and human resources available to the total organization. In some companies, the recruiting function is the exclusive responsibility of field managers or recruiting specialists. In those organizations, the recruiters use a variety of recruiting strategies that seek to recruit from both warm and cold sources. Most studies of recruiting effectiveness have demonstrated clearly that the best field associates are typically found using warm strategies and warm sources (ie sources which are known by the organization, have a track record and are considered to have some sort of vested interest in the success of the recruit).

Based on this information, it is logical for field executives to direct their recruiters to focus on strategies for developing warm sources, such as nominators and centers of influence. Focusing on warm source strategies requires a great deal of personal time and energy and, as a result, field managers often exclude cold or neutral sources. Unfortunately, many recruiters don’t have either the time or resources to create a sufficient flow of qualified candidates and can be forced to rely on cold sources, often at the expense of the more productive warm sources. Without the flow of qualified candidates, many managers move from the recruiting process to the hiring process and skip the selection process. This results in less effective hiring and unpredictable productivity and retention.

Fortunately the advances in communication technology allow an organization to create an extremely large flow of prequalified candidates without using all of the recruiter’s time and energy to prescreen a large number of cold source candidates. This requires a corporate paradigm shift regarding recruiting.

Currently, several companies rely exclusively on the sources and strategies of a diverse group of recruiters scattered across large geographic territories. Companies can now create a corporate recruiting culture that focuses resources on a global strategy and capitalizes on the individual strengths of each local recruiter. It must be emphasized that this approach complements warm source strategies rather than replacing them. In other words, a manager can use technology to prequalify candidates from cold sources and still have time to continue on a regular basis with the warm source strategies.

Think of the potential flow of prequalified candidates that could be achieved
if:

• Every employee of an organization became a center of influence or referral source.
• All the existing and future advertising and marketing efforts of an organization included marketing of the sales career opportunity.
• Every client and supplier of an organization started referring potential candidates.
• The entire job market had 24-hour, 7-day-a-week access to the recruiting system.
• Every college campus career counselling center had instant access to your presceening system.

Many progressive companies are using the Internet and corporate intranet to create a global corporate recruiting culture. Their home offices are doing more to assist the field with recruiting and taking more responsibility for the recruiting function.

Our research data have clearly demonstrated that there is often little or no correlation between success as a sales associate and success as a sales manager. An individual can be an excellent sales associate and an excellent manager or an excellent sales associate and a poor manager. Many companies have based their management succession planning exclusively on sales performance and blindly recruited their top field sales associates into sales management positions. These companies have discovered the hard way that performance as a sales associate does not predict performance as a sales manager.

Companies employing this strategy have often lost a great sales associate ( a retention statistic) and acquired a poor sales manager ( a training and development nightmare). Briefly, a top associate requires power; a top sales manager requires power and patience. Many associates who become recruiters rely instinctively on their skills and are extremely talented at presenting the features of a career. Unfortunately, this often comes across as defensive and can result in over-selling of the career. In today’s job market, a recruiter must learn career management skills as well as presentation skills.

To fully capitalize on the global recruiting approach and the new job market, recruiters must learn a new set of skills to attract and contract top sales professionals. The existing job market is no longer based on jobs but rather on opportunities. Today major sources of employment are self-employment and temporary contract positions. The financial services professional is a perfect fit for the current market. Top executives and sales candidates with high potential are looking for opportunities that would be best described as self-employed opportunities with unlimited inventory, unlimited market, excellent marketing systems, top sales training, good coaching, high income potential, no financial front end load and minimal financial risk.

To be effective career managers, recruiters must learn an effective career pathing approach and learn to ask rather than tell. A good sales process always begins with a comprehensive fact-find. The first step of a good career management process is designed to determine whether a potential candidate is "disturbed" or "disturbable" from a career perspective.

From a motivational perspective, the best candidates are disturbable rather than disturbed. Candidates who are disturbed are not happy with their current employment status and want to get out of their present job or change their status. They are not necessarily interested in the next career position. Candidates who are disturbable are generally happy with their current situation, but would consider a better opportunity if it was available.

Disturbed candidates respond well to the traditional recruiting strategy of selling the sales career. It is attractive to this type of individual to have a successful, professional manager show interest and a desire to train and coach the recruit. Unfortunately, disturbed candidates are typically not the best potential candidates and often prove to be motivational problems.

The best candidates are often performing well in their current positions and are quite satisfied with their careers. They would only consider changing careers if the new opportunity helped them grow on either a personal or a professional level. The new career would have to include all their current sources of satisfaction and offer additional benefits.

Determining the career motivation of a potential candidate requires asking at least the following three questions in the fact-finding process:

1. How do you feel about your current position?
2. What do you like about your current position?
3. What else would you like to have in your position?

The career presentation should include all the current likes as well as the additional likes where appropriate. In addition to all the benefits of self-employment, the financial services sales career offers a unique appeal: the more people you help, the more money you make. Many professions that help people don’t make a lot of money. As a result, the career combines significant financial gain with high career satisfaction.

The goal of electronic recruiting is to develop an efficient, economical process for targeting and pre-screening a large number of recruits with high potential. Our studies on the use of technology have demonstrated that the major benefit of technology is efficiency. For example, we did a study investigating the performance of field associates before and after they purchased a personal computer. The results were quite surprising; there were no differences in performance, as reflected by sales results, before and after the computer. However, field associates reported having more time for other activities. In other words, the computer made them efficient, even if they did not necessarily invest the extra time in sales-related activities.

The same is true of electronic recruiting. Technology allows recruiters to prescreen large numbers of cold and neutral source candidates and focus their energies on warm source strategies and selection of prequalified candidates. Companies can design a set of pre-screening questions based on studies of successful versus unsuccessful sales associates and electronically evaluate the responses of a new candidate to the ideal profile (Figure 1). The net result will be a continuous flow of pre-qualified candidates.

The technology behind the system can be complex but the actual process is quite simple. A recruiting strategy targets a recruit, who is encouraged to hook up electronically to an interactive pre-screening process. The pre-screening process is based on the criteria associated with successful field associates.

The pre-screening criteria are presented electronically and the candidate interacts with the technology allowing his or her profile to be compared to successful field associates. If the candidate passes the pre-screening process, the candidate is referred to the local recruiter who begins the selection process.

The world wide web and other developments in information technology continue to offer innovative ways to market career opportunities passively These provide new means to contact potential candidates. Effective use of these technologies including directories, search engines and retrieval devices allow users to find your information, even when they don’t know they’re looking for it.

The more interesting and profitable cold source strategies are the active recruiting methods employed by most organizations, which include, but are not limited to:

• Media: -newspapers, magazines, radio, television
• Business cards, flyers, billboards
• Referrals, networks
• Notices to current clients, associates, employees.
• College/university recruiting – career counselling services, career placement services
• Job fairs
• Human resource departments – re-engineering, early retirements.
• Company recruiters, suppliers.

All these strategies can direct candidates to the company’s web site where candidates can explore the opportunity at their leisure and free of any pressure. Connections to university and college career centers, relocation firms, employment agencies and job-related bulletin boards also allow candidates 24-hour access to these on-line recruiting and pre-screening systems.

It must also be emphasized that the electronic process not only is convenient but also saves the candidate a great deal of time. Candidates can prequalify at their own convenience. It may not surprise you to learn that some candidates would prefer to be pre-screened electronically than by a sales manager.

Electronic recruiting provides the beginnings of an extensive database that can be linked to future performance and retention issues. The tracking of candidates can identify the best sources of recruits and streamline future recruiting and selection activities. The increased flow of prequalified candidates will also allow organizations to select the best candidates, rather than hire anyone who can pass the pre-screening criteria.

Phone: (800) 760-9066. E-mail: service@self-management.com.