Business managers, particularly entrepreneurs and small business owners, have a downright awful track record when it comes to hiring sales talent. When you hire the right sales resource, you see instant results and amazing things begin to happen. On the other hand, when you hire a mediocre (or worse) salesperson, you shell out paycheck after paycheck and begin to feel like you’re running a corporate welfare program.

Sound familiar? Read the series:

• How to Hire Salespeople, Part 1: Why It’s So Hard.
• How to Hire Salespeople, Part 2: Reading a Sales Resume
• How to Hire Salespeople, Part 3: The Interview
• How to Hire Salespeople, Part 4: The Offer

I won’t lie to you.

We’re a damn tricky generation. We’ve got Facebook, web-enabled cell phones, blogs, LiveJournals, Twitter accounts, and MySpace. It’s hard to know what’s business friendly and what’s just goofing off.

In a 2009 report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy, 61% of chief executives say they have trouble recruiting and integrating younger employees.

Worse than that, we have this sort of… superiority complex. Or so we’ve been told. And we’re sure you’ve heard it, too. Bunk. Pure drivel. What we -do- have is access to almost unlimited amounts of experience and information at our fingertips. Give us a week and we’ll be experts in anything.

Oh, right, and we’ve got doting parents, too… who carted us from one soccer match to the next while we graciously and gratefully grabbed up our trophies for participation and good sportsmanship. We’re apparently very dumb, you know, what with having the highest SAT scores in decades. We’re also drugged out on any number of legal or illegal prescriptions, to compensate for our rampant A.D.D.

Do you really believe all that crap? Neither do I.

Psychotic Resumes.