Last week I was talking to a Sales Director about recruiting people for his sales team.

I looked through the job specification to see that almost every phrase was unrelated to sales.
“To submit monthly sales forecast”
“To attend weekly meeting”
and so on

Then there were the skills required:
“Good communicator”
“Five years sales experience”

I pointed out that top talented sales people would be turned off by the job descriptions because they were barriers to making sales.”Must be a good communicator” was a wasted phrase because to have become a top talent salesperson the individual must have excellent communication skills.The descriptions were bland and unexciting

“What you need is something that will draw in top talent, not put it off”
Was my advice and together we went about restructuring the documents. I was keen to show that job descriptions and specifications should be future focussed, attractive to the target candidate and avoid applications from candidates that were obviously NOT suited for the role.

Result:
Together we rejected the bland and unexciting language and replaced it with the following:
“The successful candidate will have penetrated two new clients and concluded half a million pounds worth of sales within twelve months of assuming the role”
Other phrases were designed to reflect the new focus and today he phoned me to say that a candidate had complimented him on having an “exciting and easily understood job role”.

For more info on effective job role design tel: (44) 01727 838321

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2012 at 10:00 am and is filed under Recruitment.