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.
The starting point should be to 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 e.g.
- Personal character, standards and fit
- Role expectations and experience
List the various ways you can assess each of the elements e.g.
- CV/Resume and social media screening i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook
- Preliminary telephone/zoom screen (shorter)
- Assessment option 1
- Face-to-face interview (longer)
- Assessment option 2 – feedback debrief
- Follow up interview (optional)
- Reference Checking
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.
Using recruitment grade, quality assessments, case studies and simulations
Recruitment grade psychometric assessments deliver specific information.
It should be noted that psychometric assessments should account for no more than 20% of the recruitment decision.
Case Studies and Simulations are also a great way to get people to demonstrate their knowledge and capabilities.
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.
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:
We hope this gets you started and helps you better assess sales recruits.
Author: Sue Barrett, www.salesessentials.com