You’re going to make some mistakes!

Having led different-sized sales forces over the years, I’ve made some massive hiring mistakes. This isn’t a “how to avoid all hiring mistakes” piece; everyone will make hiring errors over a long and active career. It is how you respond to those mistakes that can make a big difference in your company.

Some of my mistakes:

• A top East Coast sales manager had an impeccable resume and a history of accomplishments. All his references checked out, and he passed my multiple-stage interviews with his peers and me. Every response was spot-on, demonstrating an uncanny knowledge of our business, and he seemed perfect. At my board meeting, as I was preparing an offer, I advised the board of my concerns that he seems “too good” to be true, but we would know in 90 days. Without too much detail, we began to see issues in the 60-day period, and when 90 days were almost up, I was preparing a termination. He resigned on day 89, having accomplished nothing we jointly set out as a plan for him.
• A gentleman on the West Coast had an impeccable history, accomplishments, solid paper and a depth of understanding of the EMS industry. He was also my worst-ever hire. When I finally understood the mistake I had made and began a corrective program, he quit as well. The lies and falsehoods he made about our company capabilities and myself caused damage across the region to our brand, his teammates (backdoor gossip), and my leadership. On an exit interview he told HR he was afraid I would resort to violence once he left. I had to personally own the corrective actions across the territory, repairing the lies, and it became a massive time-suck to get back to ground zero with potential customers, manufacturer reps and some existing customers. (This pattern repeated in his subsequent career moves, or so I heard from hiring managers who were embarrassed that they, too, had hired him.)
• A young woman whose first three months were as strong as any new hire I ever made, bringing new opportunities and working with me on a massive deal I had started before she came aboard. We lost that deal (no fault of hers), and in the following three months every potential deal she brought to us fizzled, almost all before a quote stage. Then, communications stopped. Every call or “I am coming to travel with you” action was driven by me. We agreed on corrective actions, but none of the milestones was hit. Expenses ceased, new opportunities dried up, reports and CRM entries stopped. When I confronted her, she mentioned that she had “some issues” that were never disclosed to me or our HR department, and she couldn’t work for us. After termination, it was rumored she may have held a concurrent job with a competitor.

Keep in mind I always lived and worked hundreds or thousands of miles away from my team, so we didn’t meet face-to-face in the office every week. We had reporting (CRM) requirements, however, as well as many calls during the week. I also traveled with my team as often as possible, helping move deals forward or assisting with closing deals. Metrics were fudged, details of their activities were fabricated and when I made time to travel with them there seemed to be health or family reasons many of those planned trips had to be postponed. The 30, 60, 90, 180 and 360-day sales goals that were mutually agreed upon onboarding with each new hire, and their subsequent progress reports, mostly turned out to be inaccurate.

For many years, I ran remote sales forces ranging from three to 100 strong. But my propensity to believe my team over what the metrics were indicating led me to suboptimize my role to some degree with these three individuals. Some of these folks also came through professional EMS recruiters, who also could have been able to spot issues before presenting a candidate to me.

The takeaways:

1. When managing a team over a long period of time, you’ll make hiring mistakes.
2. Good paper (résumés), prescreening by a recruiter, multiple “touch points” in an interview process with multiple cross-functional senior leaders, excellent knowledge of our business and solid references don’t always guarantee a good hire.
3. In the highly competitive EMS sales world, with our extremely long sales cycles, it will probably take more than a few months to discover you have made a bad hire.
4. Personality tests don’t guarantee a good fit.
5. Using a professional EMS recruiter is no guarantee. (Note to all my EMS recruiter friends: you are an excellent resource, just not foolproof.)
6. Setting 30, 60, 90, 180 and 360-day sales plans/goals during the first week of employment (onboarding), detailing jointly agreed-upon accomplishments/milestones, are a good indicator of future success, but not a 100% guarantee.
7. You cannot run a salesforce from a dashboard (CRM) alone. You must be in the field selling with them. That said, tracking progress in a CRM is an indicator to pay attention to.
8. A good passive way to view remote sales progress is expenses, which is counterintuitive to a fiscally conservative company. If they aren’t spending on lunches, as one example, something’s up.
9. Speaking with and visiting potential new prospects the new hire is engaging is smart practice, but no guarantee of success.
10. A detailed job description is important to avoid any misunderstanding early in an interview process.

I treated recruiting as a 24/7 sort of side job I had to do. I was always on the look-out for talent and performance. I used all these takeaways in the hiring process, and in managing them once they were hired. And while most of my recruiting was successful, I made some huge mistakes. How I responded when it became clear I made an error were some of my most memorable accomplishments.

Want to be a dynamic growth engine sales leader? Get over yourself. We all make mistakes. Failing to admit them, refusing to try to correct them, and finally having to make a hard termination call if you cannot turn the person around, is what can kill your small-to-medium-sized business. I was often asked if terminating an employee was hard. Yes! If it becomes easy to fire someone, it is time to punch out; you’ve lost your heart.

Use your best demonstrated practices recruiting and making hiring decisions, try not to make a quick hiring decision no matter how good the person seems, stay true to your recruitment process, and while you’ll probably be successful most of the time, you will have some catastrophic failures. Identify them as fast as possible, invest time to correct those errors and terminate quickly when you are sure this was a hiring mistake.

Jake Kulp is founder of JHK Technical Solutions, where he assists OEMs and EMS companies with optimizing demand creation offerings and deciding when and where to outsource manufacturing. He previously spent nearly 40 years in executive roles in sales and business development at MC Assembly, Suntron, FlexTek, EMS, and AMP Inc. He can be reached at jkulp@cox.net.