I’ve lined myself up in front of fish tank on purpose for this particular video because the fish are going to be part of the story. I know many of you read the transcript and enjoy following the blog that way and I think that’s great. But I also know many people watch the video, and I’ve heard that you like to see the fish. So, go ahead and watch the fish while I talk if you like. But the other reason is because we talk about putting people into environments that really suit them well. And that we have the right type of person in a job and in an environment that really does match up well with them.

So, I was talking to a candidate about this and how it all kind of ties together and I said, you know, you can be a beautiful fish but if you are a fresh water fish and you are put in a salt water tank, you’re not going to do really well. And if you are a cold-water fish and you are put in a warm water tank you’re not going to do really well. So, it has nothing to do with the beauty and the quality of the fish. You need to put the right fish in the right kind of tank. And you need to put the right type of people in an environment that suits their behavioral nature, and provide them with the kind of coaching and the mentoring that suits their needs.

Yes, there are many different ways to get jobs done and different behavioral styles can definitely be successful in the same environment. But you the manager make the difference because you know how to create the environment that just like putting a fresh water fish in a fresh water tank and a salt water fish in a salt water tank. Hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time, thanks for listening.

I want to talk to you today about when you’re thinking about how much effort you put into what you do, and whether or not anybody actually notices. The reason for this story is because I had an opportunity to talk with the candidate just recently and they said to me, “hey Bob, you really like what you do, I can tell you really enjoy it. And this was a very interesting time for me to learn about myself. I went through this one other time and it was so obvious that the person who was reviewing my profile with me was bored. They just mailed it in and there was nothing that I really got out of that experience.” And it made me realize that people really do see the difference. People can recognize when you’re putting forth an effort to make it special and to make it good.

There are repetitive aspects of everybody’s job. Think about the Broadway actor who is playing Hamlet and needs to read “To be or not to be” six nights a week and for two matinees. But just as every single audience is different, every single candidate is different, every single client is different and you need to look what you do in the eyes of the people that you’re delivering your work for — embrace how they will feel about it, look at how they will view it and you’ll be able to move beyond any aspect of repetitive boredom.

Really enjoy and embrace what you do. There is so much pleasure in what we get to do and how we’re able to work with people. You need to take advantage of that, just like the sign says at my pet store that we visit, Bark Less, Wag More. Thanks for your time.

You’re going to notice that I’m a little bit dressed up for today’s video blog and the reason for that is because we are going to role play a job interview and I’m the candidate, so you know I got to look good for my role play. What I’m going to do is I’m going to answer some questions that get asked sometimes in a sales interview and then comment about the three ways that we can really take advantage of gaining information about our candidate, questions certainly being one of them.

So, here we go:

Candidate:

Oh yes, I’m a very good hunter. I love to hunt, oh hunting that’s the best part of sales. Oh, sure be happy to share an example with you. It was Pierre Cardin Eyeware Designs, they are at 485 Madison Avenue. Yeah, they actually shared a floor with Mad Magazine. I never did see Alfred Newman but I wonder whether it was there but, you know. I knocked on their door actually called them first, got their name on a list. Had a chance to talk with the president of the company, a nice Frenchman by the name of Yves Farigier and took him through the whole sales cycle, ended up closing the deal and they became one of my key accounts in Manhattan and it became a great reference. Love hunting, just love hunting.

I’m an excellent closer, excellent closer. Let me tell you a great story. It was 3D Bed and Bath, Bernie Abraham, he was the CEO. I took my CEO to meet Bernie and Bernie just beat the heck out of my CEO. We are having some money problems at the time and Bernie was concerned about that. So, on the way back to the office my CEO let me have it. He told me these guys are not ready to buy from you. They are never going to buy, why did you waste my time for blah, blah, blah. Well, the next day I got to Bernie’s office at 5:30 at night and three hours later I’ve got a signed contract and a 10 percent deposit on two computer systems. I’ve got great closing skills.

Competitive, oh yes I’m a very competitive guy, absolutely. In fact let me share with you. I played Varsity Tennis for four years and I wasn’t that good and I lost plenty of matches to guys that were better than me. But if it was close I was going to win. We played best of three sets and there wasn’t one match in my four years that if went to a third set that I didn’t win. I’m as competitive and I’m as tough as you’ll find anybody.

Okay, time out. So, pretty classic interview questions that get asked. Are you a hunter or farmer? Are you a good closer? Are you competitive? And although they are not bad questions I much rather see you utilize your questioning time to get to information that you can’t get other ways. You can find out whether somebody is a hunter or a farmer by looking at their behavioral profile. Let’s face it, the behavioral profile is not going to lie and there is a very specific difference in what a hunter is and what a farmer is. You can go watch the Opus blog, it talks about them. Ask your candidate these questions and they are going to tell you what they think you want to hear. But you can get good answers to questions. Not every question is going to be positioned that way.

Ask them about how their pipeline got built when they worked at ABC company.
They are going to tell you and that will lead to whether that ties into how you built your pipe line.

Ask them about the nature of the competitive environment.

• Who do they compete with?
• How did they win against that competition? (Ask this in order to learn how they sold in that situation.)

Ask about the nature of the complexity of the sales process.

• Who did they sale to?
• Who did they need to meet with and how did that work?

What you’re trying to find out in your questioning is how similar a world has this person come from, as it relates to their behavioral nature. Are they a good closer? Are they a hunter? Are they competitive? Utilize the behavioral matrix that you have at your fingertips and utilize your power of observation.

You do not have to ask anybody whether they are a good closer or not. See if they close you. Ask yourself, if this person were a good closer what would they be doing right now in the interview process. Because a good closer doesn’t just mean that they ask for the job. It means that they ask for the job when they have earned the right to ask for the job and they are trial closing all along. Use your power of observation as it relates to closing skills, listening skills, speaking skills. Use the behavioral matrix to have a clear understanding to the behavioral nature of the candidate and ask questions that shed light on how the person has been involved in an environment that most likely mimics the environment that you will be putting them in. Thanks for your attention.

As I think you all know, I have an opportunity to talk to people every day about their personality style and their personality profile. And many people look forward to the conversations, and many people, especially candidates, are a bit nervous about what the profile is going to say about them. And lo and behold, in the eyes of the beholder the profile is seen as a positive picture of their personality style. And the reason is because it focuses on the strengths of the individual, what the person does well. And if that is what you do well, be it a relationship builder, or create harmony, or create process, all of those things make you feel good about yourself. And so it’s really common, at the end of the conversation, that the individual will say to me, “Gee, I’m not as bad as I thought I was”. I laugh and I say, “Well, yeah. You know, you’re not. In fact, there are a lot of really positive things about your personality and there are a lot of things that you can be very effective in doing.” The conversation turns out to be very much an affirmation of the individual’s strengths and it feels good. It feels good for them. I have to tell you it feels good for me, too, because we’re talking about positive things and it’s very relevant because we can build and grow from our strengths much faster, much more effectively and have a lot more fun doing it, than always worrying about what we do wrong. You know, I think we heard enough about what we did wrong when we were kids. It’s time to move beyond that. And, yes, I know we sometimes have that little boy or little girl on our shoulder telling us that we suck, but you know, there is more to life than that. If you can truly embrace what you do well and what your strengths are, then you can actually take on those things that you’re not as comfortable with, and recognize the need to consciously adapt your behavior to deal with those things, but celebrate the fact that you actually bring a lot of strengths to the table. So it’s true, maybe you don’t suck as much as you think. Did you ever think of that? You should. Thanks for your time.

I saw this mask when I was out shopping with my wife for the holidays and, of course, like anything, whenever I see something like this my thoughts always go to business. I thought about a kid holding this up like this and thinking that the person whom you get to see is the mask, not the real person. And I got to thinking about this as it relates to the hiring process because, let’s face it; whenever a candidate comes in to see us, no matter what they may say about wanting to be sure that it’s a good fit for them, too, people put on a mask, and that mask is what they think you want to see. It’s just human nature and it can be very difficult for us to decipher whether we’re looking at the real person or if we’re looking at the mask.

One of the tools that we provide to help you with this is the Behavioral Profiling tool that breaks out for you the basic, natural self, as in who the real person is, and then how we get to see that person. Think about how relevant that is for you when you’re trying to make a hiring decision, because is it the person with the mask who is going to show up or is it, in fact, the real person? And we know that in terms of providing motivation, guidance, leadership, coaching and everything else, it needs to be the real person whom you’re motivating not the mask. Thanks for your attention, I look forward to being with you again.

Even in these difficult economic times, our clients still find it very difficult to find quality candidates that they are prepared to hire. We would like to think that people are just sticking out there, you know, hanging around the telephone booth waiting for the phone call but the fact of the matter is most of us have very, very specific needs and it’s hard to find candidates that really do fit the bill. But every once in a while, you find two.

The question becomes:

What steps can you take when you really have two quality candidates?

That was a dilemma that one of our clients was facing. It was a position for sales and they had two candidates, each had very different personality profiles, both of them could certainly be very effective in sales. But their situations were very different. One person had been out of work for a while, had taken a bit of a sabbatical to deal with some family-related issues which is not at all unusual. The other person was gainfully employed, working for a competitor, and was being recruited by them, so to speak.

Well the first candidate was going full speed all out to get the job. Anything that needed to be done as part of the interview process, they really went overboard and did everything perfectly. The other candidate who was gainfully employed didn’t put nearly as much time into the effort. As a result when it came to presentations and follow-up, they really didn’t measure up at the same level. But the client understood why.

So we talked about it. I made a recommendation to let both of them know that there is competition for the position, and to let them know what your concern is in each case. Give them a chance to see how they would respond and how they would deal with that situation because after all, for sales people, this is going to be a natural evolution and this is an opportunity for you to have evidence of their behavior.

You might likely say, well the person who’s gainfully employed, well they’re not going to put in the same effort and the person who is unemployed is really going to knock themselves out. But the true nature of a competitor will come through when they realize a position that they say they want is on the line.

So the morale of the story is, give your candidates a chance to compete and pay close attention to how they deal with it because the way they deal with that competition will be very much the way they deal with…working for you.

We’re going to review an email that I received over the weekend. These are the kind of emails that can really make a weekend special let me tell you. I’m going to leave off the details because they’re irrelevant to the story but it reads like this:

It says, “Hi Bob. I have recently joined a company. My current employer doesn’t
know this yet, so please keep that quiet. Please find copied here with, the name of the Human Resources Manager. She is our Senior Human Resource Manager and we have discussed using your services as part of our recruitment process. I would also be interested in you conducting an analysis on the existing sales team as a way to understand more deeply the team we already have in the field.” And it’s signed by this individual who is the new Senior Vice President of Sales.

So this had great meaning to me for a lot of reasons. Obviously it’s a new prospect. It looks like the sales cycle is going to be relatively short. The SVP of Sales has worked with us. He gets it. He understands what the value is. How great is that?

What’s really interesting as a business person and as a sales person is to really
grandfather where this came from because this obviously didn’t start with this company and it didn’t even start with the company that this person worked for. It started with a company one before that. Because the individual that brought our product to the company where this person was started with us about 10 years ago and we worked with that person for a number of years with that company. He then moved over into this new organization and brought our services with him.

The writer of this email was one of the managers that when our services were initially presented, kind of rolled his eyes and said, “What do we need that for?” Well that was about five years ago. We had an opportunity to work together obviously over those years and now we’re going to continue to have an opportunity to work on that.

All of this started with a cold call. All of this started because somebody who was on my team had the guts to pick up the phone and call a senior level executive and talk to them about what we did and engaged them in conversation. So for all of you cold callers out there, banging your head against the wall wondering what they’re really worth, when you strike the gold line, you can write it for a long way. This client will be the seventh client that we will do business with over the last decade that all came from that one sales person picking up the phone to talk to one prospect.

So keep at it even though it’s hard. Even though you may get disappointed based on the percentages, remember we’re not playing baseball. Nobody cares about your batting average. All we care about are hits. Keep swinging for the fences.

You maybe aware of a quote from Henry David Thoreau – probably
something he came up with on a rainy day, when he was sitting at Waldon Pond,
which said, “most of us live lives of quiet desperation”. I’ve always found that quote
disquieting and I really feel that it doesn’t necessarily apply to everybody equally. And
I’ve never really felt that it’s applied to me. But there are times of quiet when I think
about the service that Opus provides to our clients. And I really try to understand the
value that we can bring to you, by utilizing our services.

I think its important that we all feel that we do something of value. And so I give this
probably more thought than other people do. And I really think the value is around
helping you understand motivation, what motivates you as an individual, what’s
important to you to help somebody confirm and affirm your own motivators, and then to
help you understand what motivates the people around you. Because if we understand
what people are motivated by, then we can understand what we can do to help them
accomplish what’s important to them.

And it’s not the things as much as it is the intangibles. We all have them, the desire to
win, the desire to be part of the team, the desire for security, the desire for harmony.
Whatever it is, we all have motivations that go beyond what we normally see. And
our job, and what hopefully we do well for you, is to help you understand your own
motivation and what motivates others. And for doing that then maybe, maybe Thoreau
didn’t get it right as it relates to OPUS.

One of the great things about what I get to do for a living is that I get to talk to people all over the world. I mean, I can be on the phone with a candidate for a client in Moscow or Singapore or Detroit or San Francisco or anywhere. And it’s great because it’s such a big, big world that we get to work in.

Something happened to me last week which really convinced me that as the saying goes, it’s a small world after all. I had a chance to do a profile of a candidate. And as part of the small talk, we talked about where the person was from and as it turns out, he’s from the same town that I’m from.

This is a little tiny town on the east end of Long Island. And when he gave me the family name it registered with me, and I said, “Not only do I know that you’re from the town that you’re from, I know what street your family is from.” He said, “How could you possibly know that?” I said, “It’s because your family was my next door neighbor.”

So I want you to think of the odds of that. Think of the odds when you’re talking to people all over the world that I could end up talking to the grandson of my next door neighbor. So when I recounted the story to my mom later in the day, she said, “Well you know that his Aunt Vivian was your babysitter when you were growing up.” And I just couldn’t believe it. Aunt Vivian was my babysitter?

Well, it really struck home with me that although the world is big, in so many ways what we do brings it all close together. Now I grew up in a family business where we sold merchandise in one small town and we really did get to know our customers. We knew what color of clothes they like, what sizes, what brands, and what they bought last year for Christmas. We knew all of that.

Well as much as the world has changed, there is still a lot to be said for understanding that you could be talking to your next door neighbor and your reputation of who you are and what you stand for still matters. It maybe a big world but you still can’t hide from your Aunt Vivian.

Thanks for your attention.

I want to talk with you today about whether or not a bad personality can be fixed. It’s an interesting concept and it’s something that we’re probably all familiar with at some level. I was in an Executive Suite for a number of years, and we had a receptionist who was a very sharp person, but also highly critical. If she liked you as a tenant, you got very good service. But if she decided, in her infinite wisdom, that you weren’t very capable in what you did, you got lousy service, and I watched this happen.

Of course I was on the side of getting very good service, so I was okay. But it clearly was not an okay situation. And really, the nature of this person was that she had a critical nature and you could say that she couldn’t help herself. Or of course she could. But it raises the point when you have someone that has a personality style that’s not fit for a particular role; can you as a leader fix that personality?

Well, to an extent you can, but you need to realize that there’s only so much elastic that you’re able to get out of somebody. So asking somebody to be so different from what their natural style is, is a very uncomfortable place to put people. In fact, our role as a leader is to be able to find the right fit for people.

Now maybe in this case, there wasn’t a right fit for this particular person in this organization and you need to look at that as reality as well. We only have a certain amount of flexibility and we all need it, because there isn’t any such thing as the perfect personality for a job. We all need to recognize there is a time and a place where we need to modify what our own nature is to accommodate the requirements of that position. In some ways, we all have bad personalities for what we do. Hopefully, it’s more good than bad and we can take advantage of the good and when we need to, adjust, so we could be effective in our role.

Thanks for your time.