When you hire a sales leader, you need them to get up to speed rapidly and to keep performing over the long term. Sadly, the reality is that 50% of hires fail within 18 months (Source: Harvard Business Review).

Quite rightly, companies focus on retaining existing staff. However, I rarely see any real efforts to exclusively recruit individuals that really fit into their organization and therefore want to stay regardless.

Through improving recruitment strategies, companies could easily and predictably hire individuals that don’t merely look the part and have the right background, but all importantly fit comfortably into the company culture and therefore remain loyal and productive in the long term.

So why do companies have such a hard time getting recruitment right, and what can we do about it?

Please see the chart below, and you’ll see the three typical levels of assessment:

Levels one and two are essentially what most recruitment processes focus on, i.e. does the candidate look the part and can they do the job.

Level three is harder to assess as we’re talking about intangible factors such as behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, motivation, resilience, maturity, judgment and how people are predisposed to behave in certain circumstances. For that reason, the vast majority of recruitment processes focus exclusively on the relatively superficial levels one and two.

In practice, most companies only get to understand the level three make up of candidates when the candidate is already an employee and interacting with your staff, your customers, your processes and your product. Needless to say, this is too late!

It’s no surprise therefore that companies repeatedly make costly hiring mistakes, and consequently we have this painful figure of 50% of hires failing within 18 months (Source: Harvard Business Review).

We use a groundbreaking platform to assess and benchmark the all important level three profile of each candidate, against the specific cultural profile of our client.

This happens long before our clients even see the candidate, meaning that our candidates not only look the part and can do the job, but all importantly you know they will do the job in the real world.

To back this up, 96% of all hires made with our platform are still in post and performing 12 months into their new role. What difference could that make to your business?

If you’ve ever made a bad hire or fear doing so, then perhaps it’s worth a conversation? If nothing else, I’ll happily share some insights that might be of value.