3 ways to hire the absolute best pricing talent for your business.
Making bad hiring choices negatively impact teamwork, culture and profitability. Bad hires prevent healthy teamwork and create headaches for team members and business development manager alike. They add additional stress for everyone in the business and lead to dysfunctional team behaviour further down the line.
Disengagement and unhappiness is infectious and spreads through all teams – even high performing teams. If you have a good team, make sure you do your best to protect your team from unnecessary negativity, politics and blame that can often accompany a wider business transformation process.
Underperformance and new hire turnover have significant financial impact on your business. The monetary cost of a bad hire (such as a business development manager), for example, has been shown to exceed 30% of the person’s annual salary, according to the U.S. Department of Labor – let alone the total cost of lost productivity. The recruiting cost to fill (and refill) that business development manager or other position also doubles every time a bad hire leaves the business.
CareerBuilder survey estimates that a single bad hire can cost up to $50,000, depending on salary and level of experience (with more senior or specialist hires such as a business development manager or pricing manager costing significantly more). CEB research shows the average cost per hire to be more than $7,000 across all levels; and, in high profile pricing and commercial management roles, the cost of a bad hire has been estimated to be more than 1.5 – 2 times the employee’s annual salary.
Who is most likely to leave the business first?
The attrition rate for new hires is much higher than that of all employees combined. Current research shows that average new hire turnover is now up to 23% compared with 16% for all employees. Roughly 20% of all new hires should never have been brought on in the first place. New hires are high risk regardless of how they have been selected. Rigorous selection, evaluation and informal and regular feedback sessions with a new hire should be a non-negotiable part of the recruitment process for all hiring managers that are setting up a new pricing and commercial team.
People leave businesses that don’t care A ‘bums on seats’ approach (as I’ve heard a number of HR professionals pejoratively refer to their own recruitment and hiring processes), does neither identify amazing applicants nor weed out unsuitable candidates. A ‘bums on seats approach’ is as crude as it sounds. It is not candidate-focused. It is not concerned about finding the right fit really. It pays lip service to the notion of fit but really is transactional; treating people as a tradeable commodity. It damages corporate brands and reputations.