A well-established family-run chemicals business came to us with something they'd been carrying for a while. They couldn't find decent salespeople.

Their position in the market was strong, so that wasn't it. The problem was that their proposition works a bit like a contract manufacturer's, and the team they had were very good at everything that comes after someone has decided to talk to them. Structuring a deal, getting the agreement right, keeping a customer happy for years. All of that, they had.

What nobody there had was the drive to go and win big new accounts from a standing start. Different job, different wiring.

What it was actually costing them

Two things, and the second one worried me more.

The obvious cost was that no new business was coming in. A book of accounts nobody is adding to looks healthy for a good while before it stops looking healthy. Customers get bought, budgets move, someone retires. Without new names going on the board it dries up eventually.

The quieter cost was succession. Their senior salespeople were being pulled into day-to-day account work because there was nobody else to do it. So the people who should have been building the next layer of the sales team were busy being the sales team.

Why the usual approach wouldn't have worked

You can find people with the right background here without much trouble. Chemicals, technical sales, contract manufacture. Those CVs exist and a database search turns them up.

The trouble is that a background tells you where someone has been. It tells you almost nothing about whether they'll go and knock on a door nobody has knocked on before.

So the interviews went somewhere else. Alongside the skills questions, I wanted to know why each person was thinking about moving at all. What they were after next. Whether this job honestly matched it, or whether they were just having a look round.

That takes proper time. You go through each move they've made and ask what prompted it. You ask for evidence of how they win business, not a description of how they'd win business, and those two answers sound very different once you start pushing.

It also means turning down people who look strong. Some of the candidates I said no to had good numbers behind them. They just weren't going to be happy in this particular job, and someone who isn't happy in the job doesn't stay in it.

What happened

The client knew inside the first five minutes.

He said so afterwards. Something about the man landed straight away, and part of it was that he pushed back during the interview. Asked awkward questions. Challenged a couple of assumptions about the market.

Some clients hate that. This one had asked for it, because someone who won't challenge an employer in an interview is unlikely to challenge a prospect in a sales meeting either.

I'd like to claim I engineered that moment. I didn't. What the process did was make it far more likely, by putting someone in front of him whose reasons for wanting the job were real rather than convenient.

Why a specialist mattered

It wasn't the sector knowledge, though we have that. It's that the work is slow and a bit boring and most people skip it.

Going through every career move takes hours. Asking for evidence instead of accepting the right words takes some nerve, because candidates don't always enjoy it. And turning down credible people to hold out for the right one takes a client who trusts you enough to let you.

It also cuts out what goes wrong later. Counter-offers, last-minute withdrawals, the hire who leaves in month five. Those usually trace back to someone who was never really moving in the first place, and you can see that at interview if you ask.

If you're hiring someone to open doors rather than manage accounts, the CV is the least useful part of the decision.

Need that kind of hire? Let's talk it through.