What Makes You Think You Have a Sales or Recruiting Process?

It’s true.  Executives brag about their processes.  “Oh, yes, we spent the last 15 years developing our process and it’s wonderful – wait until you see it!”  It never matters whether they’re talking about a recruiting process or a sales process, the common denominator is the pride they take in what they created.

It reminds me of the very first house my wife and I lived in nearly 20 years ago.  We had designed and planted gardens and the next project was a large perennial garden we wanted to plant. We were quite proud of what we had already done but were unsure of what plants to include and how to arrange them for a spectacular look.  So we invited a professional landscape designer to come by and his first words were, “Oh yeah, typical homeowner landscaping”, loud enough for the entire town to know we were incompetent.  Thanks to my wife’s great vision, we’ve gotten much better at landscape design (read – she designs quite impressively and I can dig holes).  But I try to keep this incident in mind whenever an executive begins to brag about their process(es).

Invariably, these home-grown processes are primitive.  Yes, they can put the process label on them, but only because there is more than one step.  But steps don’t make a good or effective process.  Whether it’s a recruiting process or a sales process, it should always include a combination of best practices, milestones, steps and stages conducted in the proper sequence, with the proper expectations, in an appropriate time frame.

So what makes you think you have a sales or recruiting process?