The sales candidate’s resume is impressive, and over the phone, they seem engaging and knowledgeable. Face-to-face, they ace the interview. The choice is natural — they’re hired. You thought your job as a hiring manager was finished. But after a few weeks at the job, it becomes apparent that your impressive, engaging new hire just isn’t a good fit for your company, leaving you wondering what happened.
It’s common knowledge among hiring managers and sales recruiters that interviews and resumes often fail to give a complete picture of sales candidates, and finding the right salesperson for a specific role in a specific business is never as easy as it first seems. Factors such as education and training stand out on paper, but they don’t always do the best job of communicating candidates’ soft skills — the essential sales qualities (like perseverance or empathy) that are often buried below the surface and difficult to identify upon first meeting somebody.
While someone may perform well in an interview, it is definitely worth remembering that the keyword is ‘perform’. Everyone puts their best face forward when they are being interviewed and it can be difficult to properly ascertain how well candidates will deal with the pressures and tempo of the sales role they will be filling on any given day — not just on the day of the interview. This is why hiring a salesperson isn’t just about finding the best candidate — it’s about finding the best fit for your company.
While it’s impossible to simply ask candidates to drop the act and simply be upfront with you, there are other options that help recruiters and hiring managers take the guesswork out of the hiring process. One such technique is to use sales personality tests to gauge your candidates’ deeper sales abilities. Using techniques developed by professional industry psychologists, sales personality tests (also known as sales assessment tests) allow you access to a fuller sense of the sales candidates’ personality, sales motivations, and overall suitability for the specific role that needs to be filled.
Sales personality tests take into account a number of benchmarks that you create, known collectively as a target profile, and then evaluates your candidates against it. While anyone can simply state that they are detail-oriented on their resume, a sales personality test will reveal whether or not that’s actually the case and whether they will be a good fit.
Many companies attest to the results of sales personality tests, and companies such as SalesTestOnline have success prediction rates upward of 90%. The tests take no longer than 10 minutes, and you have access to the results instantaneously. Furthermore, the tests can be administered online from anywhere in the world.
When it comes down to it, hiring salespeople can be a complex process. But by adding this simple ten-minute test to your hiring process, you can save yourself weeks of lost time and thousands of dollars in lost resources. Finding the right fit for your sales division is important. A sales personality test can help you bridge that gap.