How should I assess a sales recruit?

Last time I wrote about what we should be looking for in a good sales recruit.

This time we will look at how we go about assessing a sales recruit.

There are a myriad of ways you can assess someone – some are legitimate and purpose built for sales recruitment while other methods wouldn’t stand up in a court of law even if they work for you. 

Let’s take intuition or gut feel for instance.

There is nothing wrong with using your gut feelings or intuition; however, using it as your only source of assessment criteria will make it hard for you to defend your decisions to others.

So let’s back up your intuition with some solid evidence and tools that can help you determine who will be the best recruit for your sales team.

Make sure you know what qualities and capabilities you are recruiting for as per our previous article: ‘What should we be looking for in a good sales recruit?’

This will help determine the specific steps and tools you need to use. It’s all about cross matching evidence across a range of elements and looking for synchronicity or mismatches.

List the qualities, capabilities and knowledge you want to assess and make a checklist grid i.e.

• Personal character, standards and fit
  • Personal values, ethics, integrity
  • Professionalism, self-management, etc.
• Role expectations and experience
  • Sales and account planning
  • Prospecting and new business development
  • Solution Selling
  • Consultative Problem Solving
  • Business Acumen
  • Market Knowledge

List the various ways you can assess each of the elements i.e.

1. CV/Resume and social media screening i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook
2. Preliminary telephone/zoom screen (shorter)
   1. Use behaviour based interviews for best outcomes
3. Assessment option 1
   1. Preliminary psychometric assessment (if cost effective)
   2. Online course simulation
4. Face-to-face interview (longer)
   1. One-on-one and/or meet the team
   2. Use behaviour based interviews for best outcomes
5. Assessment option 2 – feedback debrief
   1. Case study, simulation task, relevant psychometric assessments
   2. Use recruitment grade psychometric assessments with shortlisted candidates
6. Follow up interview (optional)
   1. Using assessment information to guide deeper questioning
   2. Meet the team
7. Reference Checking
   1. Telephone and written

Assessment and Scoring

Have a scoring system for each area of capability and each stage of the process.

Gather your information and cross reference all elements back to the core capabilities.

Based on the evidence gathered and scores achieved move your best sales recruits to the next stage.

Increasing the effectiveness of interviews

Unstructured ‘have a chat’ interviews do very little in terms of helping you select the best sales talent. Using competency based behavioural interview question format will significantly increase your chances of assessing people effectively. Our clients have found this approach creates a much fairer, unbiased approach to selecting the right sales talent for their teams.

Using recruitment grade, quality assessments, case studies and simulations

We only recommend using recruitment grade psychometric assessments for selection purposes because they deliver much more specific information and are harder to ‘cheat’.  Also it should be noted that psychometric assessments should account for no more than 20% of the recruitment decision.

Barrett has psychometrically assessed over 100,000 people in sales and sales leadership roles so we know what gives you cut through and where you need to use assessments.

We use the following psychometric assessments with great effect:

• Personality, Motivators & Drivers, and Leadership Challenges & Derailers: Hogan Inventory
• Sales prospecting fitness and call reluctance: SPQ*Gold
• Emotional Intelligence
• Abilities assessments where appropriate: verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, abstract reasoning, mechanical reasoning, critical thinking

Case Studies and Simulations are also a great way to get people to demonstrate their knowledge and capabilities. In fact, one of our clients is using our online Sales Essentials Prospecting module in their recruitment process by asking people to undertake this short online applied course and then come to an interview demonstrating how they would go about prospecting for new business.

Be thorough but prudent

The list of ways you can assess someone is endless.

Practically, we need to weigh up how much time and how much money we want to invest in the recruitment process.

Getting sales recruitment wrong is very costly.

So we suggest you invest in the core elements that you can keep reusing again and again such as:

• Sales recruitment framework and steps
• Sales Competency set for each sales role
• Behavioural interview questions for relevant sales roles
• Value, culture, character interview questions
• Case studies and simulations
• Reference checking framework

Then you manage how you use the consumable items such as:

• Psychometric assessments
• Online training modules

 We hope this gets you started and helps you better assess sales recruits.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.
Author: Sue Barrett

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