Dan Ariely – professor at Duke University – found that the common answer has to do with the internal state of the person. (1) The reality is that the decisions people often choose to make are influenced by the environment in which they are placed.

If you are looking to hire good sales people, you have to be willing to fight. But more importantly, you need to understand what will lead a good sales rep to want to know more about your company… and consider to visit you for an interview.

Per the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, employee theft accounts for $50 billion in annual losses for businesses. In fact, 33% of bankruptcies are caused by employee theft. Per the Harvard Business Review, the most successful companies are more engaged in talent acquisition, because they are aware that as much as 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions.

Stop focusing on hard skills. As stated above, almost 50% of discrimination claims are retaliation cases. What it means is that in many cases, retaliation from the employer occurs after personality clashes and/or emotional reactions in the relationship between a senior and his/her junior.

For example, few people knew that Steve Jobs personally interviewed over 5,000 applicants! Howard Shultz at Starbuck has always bragged about being more HR-oriented than any other CEO – managing 200,000 employees, he considers that putting the company focus on HR is THE reason of Starbucks success. In his book “Good to Great,” Jim Collins discovered that the most successful corporations, over time, are those who invest more time and energy in the recruitment & on-boarding process.