Welcome to the second installment of our blog series focused on the predictive characteristics of top performing salespeople.
As a reminder, the data utilized in these analyses is global in nature and includes competitive sales positions across a variety of industries that are part of SMG’s vast database of over 25M respondents. It is also longitudinal in nature (includes the past 10 years) ensuring no temporal or geographical biases are present.
PREDICTIVE TRAIT #2: EMPLOYED AT THE TIME OF APPLICATION
Our second predictive attribute of top performing sales reps is that they are currently employed at the time of applying to a new career opportunity.
This is a natural progression from last week’s trait (warm sourced) as the majority of these folks are not actively job seeking in the traditional sense (e.g., on Indeed applying to 50 opportunities a night). In fact, most of them are likely very comfortable in their current roles, and therefore not even thinking about a career transition in the short term. As such, the recruitment / attraction approach for these candidates is entirely different than that of the unemployed active job seeker. These “disturbable” candidates need to be personally sold on your opportunity, and actively pursued and wooed by your recruiters. Typically a career management approach works best for these candidates whereby the recruiter, through a series of questions, is able to identify career characteristics that the candidate is looking for but currently does not possess.
For example:
- What do you like about your current job/career?
- What would you like to change or don’t like?
- In your ideal career, what additional things would you like to have?
A predictive psychometric assessment like the POP™ can also play an important role in converting currently employed candidates. Our research shows that even “best practices” organizations are only able to convert roughly 20% of these high-quality in-demand candidates into hires. Consequently, it is far easier to attract and recruit candidates who want out of their current situation (or an unemployed) than it is candidates who are currently successful and comfortable in their current situation. Ensuring that you have quality recruiters is also critical when attempting to place additional emphasis on the active recruitment of employed candidates.
One of the reasons that employed candidates outperform and are retained at a higher rate is that they make a volitional choice to leave something comfortable to pursue something new. The commitment and risk associated with doing so cannot be undervalued. As a result, these individuals have a higher internal motivation to excel and thrive in this new endeavour as a result of an innate need to reinforce the correctness of the decision they made to change careers.
Therefore, sales rep hires who were employed at the time of applying outperform the company average by 21.3%, whereas sales hires who were unemployed during the application process perform 41.7% below the company average. This is a marked difference, and certainly reinforces the ROI associated with targeting and pursing currently employed recruits.
Stay tuned for next weeks installment where we will unveil the third predictive demographic trait…