A few days ago I told the story of a salesman who, instead of helping to sell the products of his video game store, discouraged the customers from buying (read the article here if you missed it).
When you’re dealing with such an employee, it’s a big problem. Is there a solution? Unfortunately, imbecility cannot be cured: it can only be eliminated or prevented by avoiding hiring incompetent people.
For the elimination:
Do as you like: change his job, transfer him, encourage him to resign, fire him on the spot, promote him by assigning him the management of a store on Mars where he doesn’t do damage … Do as you like but send him away.
I’m not an expert in human resources so I can’t tell you which is the right solution for you. If you have an HR Manager, let him do it. If you don’t have one, contact an HR consultant.
But listen to me: find a way to get rid of that person as soon as you can. Because the more you hold on to him, giving him another opportunity in the hope that he will recover, the more you will regret giving it to him, because this moron will do you more damage.
For prevention:
You need to have a very selective staff selection system. It’s not enough to rely on the trial period: you have to make sure that duffers don’t even set foot in the company.
As I once read somewhere, recruiting must not be an interview: it must be an audition.
I have been told this is what happens in music groups, from amateur to professional bands. When a rock band has to include – for example – a new guitarist, they don’t ask him if he knows Jimi Hendrix’s biography: they have him practice a little with them, and so they decide if he can join the band.
I know from my own experience that it’s a working system, because I experienced it myself a few years ago, when we were looking for a software developer. After making a few mistakes in hiring, taking people who were ultra-referenced on the CV but absolutely incompetent in practice, I remember changing the method.
To all the candidates who seemed suitable to us on paper, we offered an interview with them saying more or less this:
– We read your CV and you seem to have all the right requirements, blah blah blah. We would like to meet you for a cognitive interview, blah blah, blah, blah. After a talk, we’ll give you a short practical test: we’ll provide you with a laptop with an already installed and working development environment, and we’ll assign you a small program to develop.
Result:
– some people were already declining the interview on the phone;
– some accepted, but then they didn’t even show up for interview.
– some of them accepted, showed up for the interview, but at the last minute they made a thousand excuses for not having to undergo the practical test.
– only the really good ones accepted, introduced themselves, and did the little test without any worries whatsoever, confident that they really knew how to do what was written in their CV.
Since then, we have saved a lot of time in useless conversations, and we have never hired bad programmers again.
All tasks require knowledge, skills, or attitudes that can be put to the test during the interview: identify those typical of the role you are looking for, and submit candidates no longer to an interview, but to an audition.
In particular, if you are dealing with sellers, avoiding duffers is essential not to derail sales opportunities.
And speaking of sales opportunities, this is the lead generation system that can make good sellers happy, because it provides new qualified leads every month:
