SalesHQ

Career Paths >> Browse Articles >> Getting into Sales

Secrets Buried In a Sales Person's Resume

The vehicle that introduces sales people to companies is a resume, but there are secrets hidden in the resume that hiring managers should know before they interview a candidate.

In my sales management career, I would bet that I’ve seen about 5,000 resumes for sales people. Yet, I still haven’t seen one that shows someone who has achieved 40% of quota. Every single resume shows 100%, 200%, 2,000,000% of goal. Where are all of the people who have had less than stellar sales performances? Did they all leave the sales profession? If all of the resumes that I saw truly represented the performance of the individual, the U.S. economy would be thriving to say the least. Every company would be enjoying record revenue performances.

If you have read my past articles, you’ve felt my passion for creating sales marriages, those relationships whereby a mutually beneficial relationship is formulated between a sales professional and a company based on synergistic matches of needs. This is not easy to do as, right off the bat, the relationship begins with a flawed tool, a resume. It is this tool that dupes, tricks, and stretches the truth of a person’s pedigree. Yet, as an employer, that is what you have to work with when hiring a sales professional so you need to find a way to mine through the information in a quest for the complete truth.

I spend a tremendous amount of time preaching about the importance of honesty and integrity in sales. Those are two words that are not often associated with the profession. As such, I believe that the quest to find sales people who represent a company’s brand well starts with a thorough resume review. Plain and simple, dishonesty in a sales person’s resume means they don’t play on my team. There are more than enough statistics to support the issue of what I call “resume inflation.”

I can recall a time when I ran a sales organization in the employment screening industry, a company that provided pre-employment background screening for other companies. We made an offer to a sales candidate who had impressed everyone he met including the CEO. When we ran his background check, our core business, we found that his claim to have worked for a company for two and a half years was actually two and a half months. The funny part is when we asked him about the discrepancy, he lied again and said his former employer made a mistake. Fifteen minutes later, he called back (I think he remembered that background screening was our core business) and fessed up. Needless to say, we couldn’t have this person selling our background screening services.

Think about this, if someone would apply for a sales job at a company whose core business was employment background screening and lie about their background, what candidates do you think you are seeing? Every day, new technologies are introduced to the marketplace to make the screening process better and easier for hiring managers. Yet, none of these technology companies advocate using their technology as a replacement for a strong screening process. Assessments, for example, serve as a tool for the process, but do not replace the process itself. Thus, it all begins with a strong resume review.

The resume review should not occur for the first time with the candidate sitting in front of you. An effective interview requires preparation. As such, the resume should be studied and areas of question identified so that questions can be asked of the candidate during the interview. What areas should be perused? Here are five areas of a sales resume that require detailed attention.

1: Accomplishments→

---