One of the challenges we face as sales recruiters in every industry is identifying, hiring, screening, and onboarding of new sales talent within our companies.
The higher up the food chain in terms of experience and wrong decisions become bigger problems for management. The process of advertising, screening, hiring, and onboarding is laborious and expensive. The more experienced the hire, and the more important the role, the more expensive it becomes. As a 3rd party sales recruiter this is extremely important, because if you hire a salesperson from me that I have represented as a top 20% type of person, and they don’t perform the same for your company you won’t reccomend me to anyone, and won’t use me again. My ability to survive depends on being able to quickly and accurately identify sales talent.
The challenge that I see in many of my clients is that they hire by “gut feeling“. If they identify with, like, or otherwise just “feel” like that candidate is the right person for the job they hire him / her, and then go back and justify the hire based on the resume or experience. I’m not saying they don’t hire qualified candidates, I’m saying that they sometimes pass up on the “best” candiate for another qualified candidate that feels right.
This is hard to avoid in a one time hire type of position, or a position for which you hire once in a great while. But on positions where there is a track record, a position where you can track performance over time of other hires after the fact, you can identify the candidates that performed a certain way in certain tasks or tests. This approach requires a few things:
- You must interview every candidate for a specific position in exactly the same way.
- You must grade every candidate in exactly the same way
- You must track the results of those hires over time.
- You must adjust your hiring approach to match the data collected by the process, not adjust the process to give you the answers you “want”
As a 3rd party sales recruiter I had the luxury of being able to interview the top 20% of salespeople at hundreds of the top companies in Software, Consulting and Consumer Packaged Goods. I also interviewed hundreds of the bottom 80%. Over the years I developed an interviewing plan that was consistent, had the exact same core questions, and tests, and follow up data on how my candidates performed in their new jobs over their first 2 years.
Tracking all of this gives me a consistent picture of which salespeople really “have it” and which are just lucky. I can make reccomendations based on testing and data, and not “gut feel“.
This gives me a broad dataset, a 100% consistent approach, and a track record of the people I reccomended achieving similar or better results in their new jobs. The process can be used in hiring for any position from janitor to CEO, It just requires:
- The foresight to plan
- Discipline to stick to the plan
- Track the results over time
- Adjust your expectations and approach to fit the data you get.
