*"chariots of fire" plays softly in the background...*

I'm a little proud of myself today.

To bring the newbies and lurkers up to speed, I work in a headhunting agency. Last week we (meaning "I") hired a kid to do Internet researching.

It's pretty typical in this industry to hire people who have some background in whatever specialty they'll be recruiting in. They also have to be good salesmen. Since we recruit in highly technical industries (chemicals, paint, gas, yada yada) our recruiters have to be smarter than the average bear just to be able to explain all that crap.

Well. When you hire college kids to work part-time, obviously you're going to want them to get in there and start finding ways to make you money as soon as possible. You don't want to waste a lot of time training them because hour for hour they're just not as valuable as the account executives and project managers.

Sales jobs tend to be sink or swim, and I know our training is reflective of that. Over the past couple of days I've been getting some guidance from people who work the same position as this kid in other offices. They told me about how long their learning curve was and how they wished that someone had sat down with them early on to show them exactly how to search and what constitutes a decent candidate. Someone reminded me quite poignantly that "It's very easy to get lost on the Internet."

Yesterday I gave the kid a specific training assignment to work on. The results he brought me were awful. I felt for thirty seconds that I'd made a mistake by hiring him and then considered that the the kid had only been there for four days: he doesn't know shit about rubber compounding. I took the time to explain that "sales" for our purposes means outside sales and the general differences between consumer and industrial products.

Today I gave him another assignment and he had improved 100% in his results.

It's a good feeling to know you've done something right.

Posted by Tiffany at October 7, 2005 06:07 PM | TrackBack