MKTG 420 Week 4 You Decide

MKTG 420 Week 4 You Decide

In this scenario-based exercise, you are a new District Sales Manager (DSM) for a large Fortune 500 consumer goods company. One of your job responsibilities is to participate in the recruiting process. Specifically, the DSM visits local universities to interview prospective entry-level sales applicants. A detailed job description on the consumer goods salesperson job is provided in Exhibit 1. Your assignment is to visit the placement center of a smaller, local university to interview 10 prospective candidates. The 10 interviews will represent a single-day interviewing schedule at the placement center. The candidates have already had one initial interview. Since another DSM has already selected seven candidates for the second interview, you will select the remaining three candidates from a set of six résumés that the placement center has forwarded for your review.

Your task is, therefore, to select three sales candidates to fill the placement interview schedule. You are provided with a set of six résumés (see below). Generally, the personnel office recommends that DSMs stress six candidate characteristics that it considers important when recruiting and selecting high-quality consumer goods salespeople. In perceived order of importance, these attributes are:

1. Initiative and goal-directedness;
   2. Decision-making and priority-setting abilities;
   3. Communication skills and persuasiveness;
   4. Leadership and teamwork capacity;
   5. Willingness to take ownership and responsibility of customer accounts; and
   6. Problem-solving ability and creativity.

In general, the personnel office indicates that sales representatives are expected early on to be self-starters and to manage their territory and accounts on their own without a lot of supervision and feedback from the home office.

The DSM is encouraged to consider these six attributes when evaluating the applicant résumés. It is up to each DSM to develop his or her own evaluation model based on the job description and these known character attributes for success in consumer goods sales. As this week’s lecture states, “Frequently, the reason for poor interviewing is the lack of planning and preparation. A sales manager should develop a very detailed list of objectives and questions for each candidate being interviewed. Also, the interviewer must do some careful listening, observation, and note-taking, so that when the interview process is over, he or she can recall important details to help make an appropriate selection.”

Read the YOU DECIDE scenario, and using the information provided, prepare a 2-to-3-page report outlining your recommendations for the three candidates to be interviewed again. Please use APA format for your report (see Doc Sharing). Your report should contain the following.

• The criteria that you used to select the three candidates.
• Your justification of how the recommended candidates best fit your selection criteria.