How do you decide on a candidate for a sales position? Part of that answer is your determination if a candidate is qualified for a job, so part of the business of hiring a person is establishing job qualifications. These are things that a sales manager feels are as essential to satisfactory performance in that job. They can be skills, experience, and attributes that the employer wants to find in the candidate who was hired for the position. So, where do job qualifications come from? Generally, job qualifications come from the job analysis, and the manager's assessment of the skills, experience, and attributes that are necessary to perform the duties identified in the job analysis. Once created, job qualifications help you to identify potential job candidates from the pool of all applicants. Now, before we go over the various kinds of job qualifications, there's a very important thing to remember. When you are hiring a person, you need to remember that there are laws that exist that make it illegal to discriminate based on race, religion, gender, or national origin when hiring or in the workplace. So, when you are developing job qualifications never, never, never include anything to do with a person's race, religion, gender, or national origin. Now, that we have discussed that important caveat, there are seven kinds of job qualifications. Let's get started, here they are. Number one, physical characteristics such as appearance, neatness, or things like strength. For example, if a person has to be able to lift objects, you should state that as a job qualification. Number two is experience. Generally, this refers to the number of years working in a particular job or industry. Number three is education. How much education, the kinds of degrees or majors should be listed. Number four are personality traits. Personality traits reflect our characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. There are all sorts of personality traits, things like persuasiveness and adaptiveness, and these can have a big influence on a person's ability to do a job. Fortunately, psychologists have developed tests that can identify a person's predominant personality traits. Number five are person skills. These include things like communication, technological skills, like being able to use certain computer programs and specific skill relating to a job. Number six, are socio-environmental factors, such as a person's interests, activities, memberships, and the like. Finally, number seven, are cognitive abilities. Cognitive skills include the ability to learn, to process, and to apply knowledge, analyze and reason, and to evaluate and decide. Cognitive abilities are brain-based skills. We need to carry out any task from the simplest to the most complex. They have more to do with the mechanisms of how we learn, remember, problem-solve, and pay attention, rather than with any actual knowledge. Does a job qualification have to include all seven kinds? The answer is no. In fact, most job qualifications focus only on those things that managers consider essential or critical to successfully performing a job. But this list gives you the broad menu of options. One of the things that I mentioned was personality factors. You might also remember that I said that personality can be measured through tests. As part of this learning module, we want you to take a personality tests so that you can see first-hand what these tests are like. Once you complete the test, take a few moments to join the discussion board, and offer your opinions as to the reliability and the validity of the test. Remember, the results of your test are private and need not be shared in the discussion forum.
