Why should you consider hiring introverts for sales jobs?

        Yesterday New-York-City-area sales trainer Paul Castain started another interesting LinkedIn discussion with the question: “Is sales an extrovert's profession or can an introvert do quite nicely too?” Comments thus far have emphasized the advantages that introverts bring to sales, including better listening skills, better at focusing attention on the prospect and asking questions, and better at handling disappointment. What seems to be emerging is a useful shopping list for hiring sales staff.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=93464804&gid=1832739&commentID=67512626&trk=view_disc&ut=3KDYMZNuruUB41

Employers are hiring more for attitude, rely more on networking & staff referrals

        Recently Mark Murphy, an American researcher, leadership trainer, and author of Hiring for Attitude (among other books), discussed why many new hires fail quickly, why soft skills are so important now, and how the hiring landscape is changing.
        His research tracking 20,000 new hires found that 46 percent of them failed within 18 months. It also determined that, when new hires failed, 89 percent of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11 percent of the time for lack of skill. The attitudinal reasons included lack of coachability, incompatible temperament, and low levels of emotional intelligence and motivation.
        Murphy comments:  “It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re much easier to assess (that’s why attitude, not skills, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure). Virtually every job (from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that can assess technical proficiency. But what those tests don’t assess is attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.

        “Soft skills are the capabilities that attitude can enhance or undermine. For example, a newly hired executive may have the intelligence, business experience and financial acumen to fit well in a new role. But if that same executive has an authoritarian, hard-driving style, and they’re being hired into a social culture where happiness and camaraderie are paramount, that combination is unlikely to work. Additionally, many training programs have demonstrated success with increasing and improving skills—especially on the technical side. But these same programs are notoriously weak when it comes to creating attitudinal change.”
        Murphy’s findings coincide with many of my own ideas about the importance of soft skills and the need to pinpoint these elusive but all-important qualities in job candidates.  For example see:  Getting a grip on mission-critical “soft” skills:  5 simple steps http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight054.php
or Assessing Job Candidates Beyond the Technical Skills
http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight051.php

        Murphy predicts that, when hiring, employers will place an increasing emphasis on attitude in 2012 and beyond:  “Between the labor pool from China and India and the fact that there are so many workers sitting out there unemployed, we can find the skills we need. The lack of sharp wage increases in most job categories is further evidence of the abundant supply of skills. Technical proficiency, once a guarantee of lifetime employment, is a commodity in today’s job market. Attitude is what today’s companies are hiring for."
        He also says companies are finding their best people through employee referrals and networking rather than the regular channels. “They have started to realize that the high performers they already have fit the attitude they want and that these are the people they should be asking to help find more people just like them.”
        Forbes blogger Dan Schawbel adds:  “Given that data, it seems like candidates should be networking in every way possible—including social networking.” 
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