It’s Time to Slaughter the Sacred Cow – 2025 Update

In business, a sacred cow is any person, process, or practice considered beyond critique—untouchable. These sacred cows often exist quietly within a company, mooing away in the corner while eating up profit, progress, and morale. You may already know what or who it is. The real question is: what is it costing you to keep feeding that cow?

As a recruiter, executive coach, and business consultant with over three decades of experience, I’ve never seen a more dysfunctional hiring landscape than what we’re dealing with in 2025.

While job seekers are overwhelmed by conflicting advice, AI bots, and spam offers, companies are quietly bleeding time, money, and talent due to a recruiting process that’s outdated, inefficient, and increasingly manipulated by bad actors.

Most companies still approach hiring like it’s 2012, slow, bloated, and overly cautious. They rely on job boards, stale job descriptions, and multi-round interview processes while assuming “good candidates” will stick around until they figure it out.

Spoiler alert: they won’t.

There’s a common misconception regarding hiring: that the only way to succeed in a sales role is to have deep, prior experience in that specific industry. On the surface, it sounds logical. After all, understanding the product, the market, and the customer base is important.

There has long been a troubling trend in the business world: hiring salespeople as commission-only, independent contractors. After more than 30 years in sales, having experienced nearly every type of compensation structure, including high-commission roles, I can confidently say that commission-only sales positions are not only flawed but also potentially harmful to a company’s long-term success.

Do you remember the day you had your epiphany (probably in the shower if you're like me) and the vision of your company came to light? 

There’s a lot of talk lately about Return to Office (RTO) being a way for companies to “quiet fire” employees to reduce staff and costs.  As much as I’d like to jump on the bandwagon, this is nothing new.

Something I have experienced over my life is that most people are either afraid to say no or feel they can’t do so, for whatever reason. 

For anyone to understand all that goes into a job search, you must first understand how the job market works.  It is a complex and ever-changing set of rules and criteria.

What the heck is happening to your business in 2024? Are you doing what you said you were going to do at the beginning of the year? Be honest. Yeah, I didn't think so

I am sure everyone has heard the idiom "even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while".  I would like to express how it relates to sales in today's blog.

The old fashioned Word doc resume has gone the way of Willy Loman and is no longer a viable tool when looking for jobs.  If you don't have a social presence (and actively use it), you might as well stop your job search and go find a manual labor job for minimum wage.