How shallow are we! When it comes to hiring staff, Britain’s employers are more concerned with looks than qualifications, according to the results of an ‘under-cover’ social experiment.

Britain’s ‘brash’ salespeople will be extinct within just over a decade: by 2020, the stereotype of brash, fast-talking, unscrupulous sales operatives will be consigned to history, claims a sales performance management software company.

Bonuses offered to sales directors are rising sharply while sales professionals generally remain some of the best paid in business, according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s latest survey, ModernSelling.com can exclusively reveal.

In his second quarterly report, Jonathan Fitchew of Pareto Law discusses the key graduate employment trends in the sales recruitment market April-June 2008.

Sales and marketing is the major concern for budding entrepreneurs, while a passion for new ideas rather than the pursuit of wealth is what drives them to start companies, according to a recent study.

Readers will not be surprised to hear that traditional sales-versus-marketing rivalry is as strong as ever, and not only at work, according to a recent poll.

The City will lose 11,000 jobs this year and a further 8,200 will be shed in 2009 as a result of the credit crunch. That’s the view of forecasters the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).

It’s a generally accepted principle of sales recruitment in the UK that there is an over-abundance of vacancies chasing a limited number of talented candidates. However it’s not often that you hear the situation expressed as graphically as it was recently – albeit in the United States – by an unnamed sales leader from a top-tier technology company. Apparently, the demand for salespeople was such that ‘anybody with a pulse’ was being considered as a candidate.

Are you hoping that the commission on the next big deal is going to transform your life? Well, you may be in for a bit of a shock if the latest research for the National Lottery is anything to go by.

A business development manager from a Redditch-based storage and logistics company is helping spread the work about the need for language skills within business. Oakland International’s Pete Vaughan went back to the classroom to encourage pupils to broaden their future career prospects by speaking a foreign language.

Today’s UK chief executives are more likely to have US experience and an MBA, may well not be British, and will almost certainly have been to university, according to the Orange Leadership Snapshot.

At a recent masterclass held at Portsmouth Business School Professor Neil Rackham offered a number of insights into the sales recruitment process. Modernselling.com was on hand to discover how to recruit a successful salesperson.

Let’s face it, we all feel flattered when we get a call from a head-hunter, but it pays not to let our enthusiasm carry us away. Be cautious and find out as much as possible about the agency, the prospective position and the employer before committing to a meeting. And remember, the grass is not always greener….

Buyers strongly value account managers with tenure, stating that it can take a year or more for a new face to get up to speed with both their own and their clients’ business, advises technology consultancy IDC.