25 Matt Sunshine Managing Partner The Center for Sales Strategy On to the Q&A How would you describe your overall approach to recruitment? We are a talent first sales organization. If that is our starting place, we can coach and teach the rest! What is the recruitment and selection culture like at CMG Miami? Talent is the foundation of our success. So, we take the talent recruitment, evaluation and se- lection process very seriously. Once we hire someone, we pour resources into their on-board- ing and training, so we are meticulous during the recruitment and interviewing process. Whose job is it to recruit people? Everyone’s! We are all invested in the success of our account executives, so we are all involved in the recruitment process. What does your recruitment process entail? Since we are all recruiting all the time, we use all available resources to find the most talented can- didates. Once we have a candidate that fits our criteria we use the OSTI to evaluate the talent and fit. From there we launch into an extensive interviewing process involving all sales managers. Where do you find people? Everywhere! Referrals, job fairs, LinkedIn, and neighbors! How many candidates do you interview? We are typically interviewing at least 1 person per week. What is your interview process, step-by-step? We start with an initial screening, then the OSTI, face-to-face interview, panel interview with pre- sentation, CSS talent feedback call, and then ref- erences. We have even started to use the CSS Roleplay interview as another way to see if the person is what we are looking for. How has this attention to recruitment and se- lection benefited CMG Miami? We have built a foundation of talent. In today’s challenging media world having the most talent- ed sales team is a true benefit to our productiv- ity. Knowing our talent also allows a custom ap- proach to management. What is one thing you do not that really works that you were not doing a year ago? We have all become students of the OSTI. We are disciplined to our talent needs and what talents accelerate productivity for our specific market. What is something that does not work? Guessing. We do our best to use all the science available to eliminate guessing on recruitment and talent. What piece of advice would you give others that need to recruit and select top performers? The focus on people and talent is our foundation. Top performers want to be around other top performers. Our focus on recruitment has led to improved talent across all departments including support. CMG Miami is a great example of a cluster that is doing it right! They have built a great plan and they are executing that plan at a very high level.