Marketing Recruiting is Broken Part 4: Guess Who Blew the Interview?

I am not ashamed to admit that pivot tables terrify me. I love that pivot tables exist and I am just enough of a data geek that I can pivot data until it throws up faster than a toddler with a corn dog. But only if someone builds the initial table for me. Since I only really need to create a pivot table for myself once a year or so, I have to re-learn how to do it every single time. It’s rarely pretty, there is a lot of cursing and more often than not, I call my friend Jane to do it for me because she is an Excel Whisperer.

The same is true of mail merges in Word. Once a year I spend a frustrating morning printing the same address 40 times on a sheet of labels or managing to get different addresses that don’t line up properly, or the damn template goes missing. Usually the whole thing just doesn’t work and I address them by hand.

Marketing Recruiting is Broken Part 3: Pages of Despair

I think that if most professionals wrote reports, briefs, letters, plans or even email as incompetently as they write job descriptions, our knowledge-based economy would crumble and we would all be herding something that bleats. Which may or may not be different from what we do at work today, but would be infinitely sadder.

Visit any job board or any corporate website and pull out any job posting or job description, and you will see a disaster. You will see lists of duties that go on for pages, you will see requirements that no one person could ever fulfill in a lifetime, you will see preferences for this and demands for that and a chirpy little footer about how they value diversity but most certainly won’t call you. What you won’t see is any sense of priorities, opportunities to work on cool things or long-term possibilities for greatness. Are you still wondering why you have mediocre applicants?

Marketing Recruitment is Broken Part 2: Expose Yourself to ART

Here’s a fun task for a day when you don’t have much to do. Go online, find a terrific-sounding position at a great company and start applying for it using their nifty online recruiting system. The website promises it uses state-of-the-art algorithms to mine your data and find you that perfect role. If you could just take a few minutes to attach your resume…

Marketing Recruitment is Broken Part 1: Bethany’s Revenge

Meet my friends Pam and Ron. Pam has been trying to hire a marketing specialist for months. Not enough experience, too much experience, degree in botany, no industry experience; the list of reasons not to hire someone is endless.  Ron, on the other hand, has been wandering, with his spider plant, around the parking lots of office towers for similar number of months hoping to get a job as a marketing analyst. He’s a good fit for Pam’s job. In fact, he’s applied for it online three or four times now. Pam wouldn’t, of course, know this because this is where the 25-year-olds show up with their sticks and aggressive poultry. Stay with me.

Things Were Weirder Then: A Book Review

One of my favourite things to do is read or re-read old business books a decade or more after they were first published. It’s a bit like checking in with psychics at the end of the year to see if Tulsa really did disappear when the birds left.

I also like old business books because they tend to be Apple-free and resist the urge to drool over or worship Steve (like he needs a last name). It would seem that 11 years is the threshold for  AFBBs (Apple-Free Business Books. )

Dont Waste Your Sales Call Do-Over

There are so few opportunities for redemption in the cold, hard world of B2B selling. Deals are big, cycles are long, memories are longer. But just as tennis offers a second serve, sales offers the get-out-of-suckiness-free card in the form of the follow-up .

Last week we met some lazy, ill-equipped and dangerously eager sales people bungling the basics of a first meeting. Let’s see how they did on the second serve:

Six Ways to Not Suck at Selling Things to Me

Did I send some message into the universe that attracts bad sales people? Is there a rehab centre nearby for under-performers? Have suppliers everywhere been forced to hire chipmunks and voles instead of real Sales Squirrels?

I’m in a new role these days, one that spends more than the old role. Plus I’ve been pretty fast and loose with my business card at trade shows recently, so it’s not really a surprise that I am sitting through more than my usual number of pitches lately.

What is new is how absolutely atrocious they are. Unprepared, inarticulate, unprofessional, unrealistic and just plain bad sales meetings are sad and unnecessary. If you are selling something, or supporting the people who sell something, here are some basics for not sucking at this.