Analytics – while sometimes overwhelming – play an important role in the marketing sphere of a business. It’s easy to look at online ads, identify the ones that have the highest click-through rate, and create more ads like them. However, not all divisions in the corporate world are accustomed to leveraging analytics nor do all departments have data that would be helpful.
One area that doesn’t incorporate analytics is recruiting and human resources. According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2014 report, 86 percent of human resources professionals don’t use analytics at all. But that’s changing.
The Hiring Problem
The cost of a bad hire is astonishingly high. According to a 2012 Career Builder survey or HR professionals, 41 percent said that a bad hiring decision in the last year cost them at least $25,000. Twenty-five percent of companies surveyed said that hiring the wrong person cost them at least $50,000 in the last year.
When you look at lost sales of a bad hire, the opportunity costs ends up being two times the cost of the bad hire’s salary, according to InsideSales.com in the recent webinar Moneyball Hiring – Using Science to Build a Winning Sales Team.
Can analytics help? HR professionals seem to think so and the results providing a resounding “YES.”
“Fifty-seven percent of HR teams increased their investment in measurement and analytics in 2013. Companies that are ahead of the game in this area are doubling their improvements in recruiting, tripling their leadership development capabilities, and enjoying 30 percent higher stock prices than their peers,” Deloitte reports.
So companies that already use analytics are seeing a nice return on that investment.
Using Science To Identify Traits of Optimal Salespeople
People are complex beings and often make irrational decisions, which can make predicating future behavior next to impossible.
Plus, you have this question to ponder: What is more important – a person’s experience or their personality traits?
In June the Harvard Business Review interviewed Egon Zehnder senior advisor Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, who recommends hiring for potential, not just for experience. His “hallmarks for potential” for which recruiters should look include motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.
Along that vein, the InsideSales.com team identified four traits present in optimal sellers through their years of research:
- Ambition – Does this person have an intense desire to flourish in every aspect of their lives?
- Resilience – Does this person have the ability to withstand and transcend adverse situations including projects that are perceived as failures?
- Empathy – Does this person have the ability to understand what another feels and what motivates him or her?
- Openness – Is this person curious and does he or she have a genuine interest in learning about new ideas and the world?
The optimal mix of these traits will be different for every company, and just as having too little openness, for example, can detract from a salesperson’s effectiveness, so too can having too much curiosity.
Now, back to analytics. InsideSales.com took their research and created the Sales Indicator™, an analytics tool to assist companies with hiring.
It works like this: After analyzing the varying levels of the four traits in your most successful salespeople, you then have a benchmark for future job candidates and can get an indication of how they will likely perform if hired.
HR and Analytics – Your Competitive Edge
Predictive analytics tools like the Sales Indicator will be the norm in corporate recruitment in the future, but if you can invest in the technology now, it’s probable you’ll see a return shortly after implementation. With so many companies lagging behind, it could give your business a competitive edge and improve your bottom line.
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