Scenario: You are a skilled professional. You are the best of the lot and work in an excellent company. Everything is going well, and you are happy with your professional life. Now let’s say you get a call from an unknown number. You pick it up, and the conversation goes like this:
Caller: Hi. Is it <Your Name Here> speaking?
You: Yes.
Caller: I am calling from <ABC Company>. We’ve got your CV (which you never sent to the ABC company), and we’ve got a position open for <Your Job Title>. Would you be interested?
Can you relate to the above scenario? How many times have you faced the above scenario? Can you tell what’s wrong with the above?
First of all, we never sent our CV to the company. Secondly, the HR person is assuming that we’ve heard of his company (which we’ve never heard of) and how awesome it is, so we should be glad that we got an interview call from them.
First, stop assuming that everyone knows about your company and is looking for a job. Secondly, if you are calling someone who has never sent you their profile (you got their profile from somewhere online, like LinkedIn or a job board), then please take some time to tell them something about your company: Like the location of the company, how old the company is, the job timings, what salary package you offer, etc. Now, if you don’t tell these things and someone does agree to come to an interview and passes the interview, only to find out at the end that your package is low, or they can’t work in your timings, etc., then guess what? You both have ended up wasting each other’s time.
That’s where the title of this article comes from: HR Professionals Need To Be Good Sales People. If you are not a good salesperson, you won’t be able to sell your company to the top talent and attract them. Every company wants to attract top talent, and the HR department has a big responsibility on its shoulders. When you call someone for an interview, sell them the company’s finer points, and show them why they should work for you. Excite them! But suppose you talk like in the above scenario. In that case, you will only attract people who are either jobless or not happy in their current jobs (unless that’s your intention), but never the top talent because the top talent wants to clear up everything upfront before they can commit to an interview. They will ask you the above questions, and if you cannot answer them, you will look like a fool, showing your company in a bad light in front of the talent.
Why would you want to hide anything? Be honest and tell everything upfront. You can be short and straightforward, like in the above scenario, but only in the cases when you’ve advertised the job, mentioned everything in the description, and someone has applied to the job! Then we can assume that you don’t need to tell the candidate everything since it was also already mentioned in the job description.
