<p>Without sales skills, you won’t go very far. A great seller sells themselves above all. It’s about relationships. </p>
<p>But, that said, even having been with this group for several years, D still had to be willing to leave the country to take the next steps in her career. </p>
<p>Some people just can’t hear that kind of thing. </p>
<p>D went from US to Canada. Promoted back to US recently. Nobody in Canada found her under educated. FYI. </p>
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<p>The above explanation is timely. DS is a college senior, and today he mentioned being asked about SAT scores at a job interview (I can’t recall where). He was surprised, and so was I. Who knew those stellar scores would be meaningful after hs? </p>
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<p>However, when comparing someone who is just ok at sales skills but top notch at the primary function of the (non-sales) job with someone with top notch sales skills but mediocre performance at the primary function of the job, the latter will probably be hired over the former, even though the former will be more effective at the job.</p>
<p>UCB- uhh, no. Most companies have a pretty rigorous set of competencies for different jobs and they evaluate candidates against those competencies. When I’m hiring a statistician the bar on communication skills is lower than when I’m hiring an editor. When I’m hiring someone for a role in supply chain or logistics, I need better computer literacy (and programming skills) than when I’m hiring someone for investor relations.</p>
<p>You think that the Fortune 100 (or however you want to define “big business”) is really just randomly throwing the dice???</p>
<p>We had this conversation just last night at the dinner table. My sister is a senior VP in HR for a major company and she was advising my kids on strategies for interviewing, etc. Blossom is absolutely correct. That’s what big companies do - they look for different competencies based on the job skill set required.</p>
<p>Honestly, UCB, I think this was your presumption that corporate America was so stupid as to be swayed by “sales skills” because you don’t have any experience in this area.</p>
<p>And “Sales Skills” is a remarkably unhelpful bucket of abilities and experiences. If I’m Boeing, I look for different criteria for the people who staff the sales teams. These are people who sell big, complicated pieces of machinery to pretty sophisticated buyers (the airlines) with a very long sales cycle- years in some cases. These people don’t need what the general public thinks of as sales skills- shmoozy extroverts. They are typically people with degrees in engineering; when they are putting together a presentation on why a Boeing aircraft is a better choice than an Airbus, the personality of the salesperson is not even a relevant factor for the buying team. </p>
<p>Same for a whole host of highly engineered products- and all of these companies have big, sophisticated sales forces.</p>
<p>You think of the guy who sold you a life insurance policy when your first kid was born- genial golf-playing, extroverted guy who remembers your wedding anniversary.</p>
<p>Someone in sales at Siemens or GE or Cisco doesn’t need those skills. And the company doesn’t LOOK for those skills when hiring salespeople.</p>
<p>Similarly- for non-sales roles- there is typically a well crafted hierarchy of both the hard skills (Are you a six sigma black belt? Have you passed all three levels of the CFA? What is your expertise with Manugistics? Do you have your Series 7 license?) and the soft skills (is there evidence of team work, being a good follower in addition to showing leadership potential? How do you react during conflict- do you try and generate consensus or do you shove a solution down someone’s throat?)</p>
<p>This hierarchy is absolutely not the same company to company or role to role/function to function. And I think you should never get on an airplane, drive across a bridge, or take an antibiotic for an infection again if you really think the companies that build/develop/make these products don’t have a customized template for individual roles.</p>
<p>Sales skills as you define them barely get you an interview in most companies if the role doesn’t require them. I’ve worked for companies which consider those types of skills sign of psychopathic behavior when the person is all slick and no substance.</p>
<p>I think there are people who aren’t necessarily able to identify and articulate those skills, so they lump them all under “schmoozy extroverts.” I just sold a $1.6 MM project this morning (Black Friday!) to a client in the UK. I am neither schmoozy nor an extrovert :-)</p>
<p>Haven’t read the thread in its entirety but happened to have spent thanksgiving with 3 google employees yesterday. All are college grads who worked elsewhere before google. Will see 2 of them again today. Will ask about the non college grad colleagues. </p>
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<p>I have been on the hiring side of interviewing candidates before. I have encountered candidates who were obviously very good at selling themselves, but did poorly when asked technical questions relating to the job. The fact that their resumes were non-empty with respect to similar jobs indicates that they managed to sell themselves to some employers previously.</p>
<p>So were they fired / let go from those jobs and that’s why they were on the job market?</p>
<p>Possibly. Of course, if that was the case, they were expensive mistakes for their former employers.</p>
<p>One of mine was told by a recruiter that while business school A students interview better, students at business school B perform better at the job. Since he was talking to students at B, I assume he was not fooled by the mismatch.</p>
<p>If true, he would be the exception rather than the rule. School A, in my opinion, has a 60 to 40, if not a 70 to 30 recruiting advantage. Since they are considered the top two programs in the country, this advantage is significant.</p>
<p>Is there any way to play the mismatch to your advantage? My kid, the one who got no offer at one school but was the first to get a co-op and job offer at another is an example of how a mismatch can work for you. Small fish in a big pond vs big fish in a little pond…</p>
<p>Of course the Googles and Bains of this world will not be fooled (based on what Bock and Manzi had to say), but most students will not make it in to those places anyway. I am willing to bet the less elite employers would fall for it, finding Biyan Zhou the psychology and policy management major more impressive than Biyan Zhou the engineering major, in contradiction to what Bock thinks.</p>
<p>Maybe not, PG. Often, such people keep climbing the ladder by switching companies and getting promotions at each switch. Blossom aside, my impression is that the hiring process at many companies allows for glib folks to keep rising. Maybe they have to leave each place quickly enough that their lack of technical skills doesn’t give them away, but they keep rising and getting paid more.</p>
<p>When I worked in PE (and also when I used to meet the fathers of kids who went to private schools with my kids), I encountered a phenomenon of CEOs who fail upward. They can spin the last stint into a success and it works with the next hiring group. Works best if they are over 6’2" and say leaderlike things.</p>
<p>^“Chainsaw” Al Dunlap comes to mind. Remember Sunbeam and Scott Paper?</p>
<p>What is a 70/30 recruiting advantage and how do you measure it?</p>
<p>If you are talking about an MBA from U Chicago vs. U New Haven, yes, there is a recruiting advantage. But it’s predicted on course rigor and content, and the fact that most of the MBA students at U New Haven could not get into U Chicago. So corporate recruiters are using Chicago’s admissions process as a highly efficient way to slice the candidate pool. If the jobs you are hiring for require strong quantitative skills, you are more likely to find those skills- very quickly and efficiently and cheaply- if you recruit at Chicago where the GMAT scores to gain entrance are significantly higher than they are at U New Haven.</p>
<p>I’m not sure exactly what Canuck guy is talking about, since I surmise he’s talking about two schools with relative parity in student bodies (otherwise his comparison makes no sense).</p>
<p>@Canuckguy,
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<p>Yep. I spoke on a panel with him last year. Great speaker. Could have been a standup comedian. And the story is extremely compelling as he tells it – just don’t do too much research. But, I’m also thinking of guys who get brought in to turn around a company and then have a disagreement with the owner or board about exit strategy and choose to leave, etc.</p>
<p>I think there’s a kind of faulty reasoning going on here. We have fallen in to the either/or trap which is easy to do on a message board.</p>
<p>You have to have the soft skills to even use the hard skills. It’s the rare job happening only in somebody’s head. You have to be able to communicate, build relationships, convince. Sales skills, the real ones, have nothing to do with being glib and everything to do with being able to hear what people are saying and address what it is they really need.</p>
<p>This and the hard skills are not at odds.</p>
<p>^ Dichotomy is usually seen on CC.</p>
<p>Poetgirl- brava. You need the soft skills to use the hard skills; you need the hard skills to leverage the soft skills. Since the folks on CC seem to have a bias towards STEM (the holy grail of education), it follows that they are more comfortable discussing technical skills on the job market (a mechanical engineer has mastered a discrete set of competencies during college; a neuroscience major understands the following 6 topics and the following 8 processes) and less comfortable discussing how communication, leadership,empathy, influencing, etc. can be taught, measured, and evaluated.</p>
<p>You guys have never had a terrible boss? And never sat in your cubicle or office itemizing all the ways he or she was horrible?</p>
<p>@blossom I think we mis-communicated again. I was talking about 2 Canadian undergrad business programs that most knowledgeable Canadians would consider the best in the Great White North, although I can think of two others that are also in the running. School A accepts students for the junior year. If accepted, it will be all cases all the time for the final two. School B accepts student right out of high school and they are put through the pace for 4 straight years. Both are highly competitive, but the student body are clearly different. While students can get accepted in school A with no senior math credit at all, no one can be accepted in school B without two senior math credits, one of which has to be calculus.</p>