Using the right assessments in the sales hiring process should always be non-negotiable, as it takes the guesswork out of an extremely important part of recruitment – finding the best people to shortlist and interview.
But there are two critical things hiring managers need to be aware of when it comes to using pre-employment assessments: a generic personality/behaviour-style assessment will not work for sales roles, and not all sales assessment tools are built the same
Using a sales assessment tool is key
One of the leading sales assessment tools was created by the Objective Management Group (OMG), who have conducted some of the largest worldwide research into sales industry over the past 20 years. From this research, they have then been able to create candidate-screening tools that are able to predict sales success for an individual – with 96 per cent accuracy.
How is this for a statistic? Of the nearly one million salespeople assessed by OMG, 92 per cent of recommended and hired candidates reached the top half of the sales force within 12 months. And 75 per cent of candidates who were not recommended, but hired anyway, failed within six months.
It’s not really the kind of data you can argue with – and for those managers and business owners who are frustrated with continually hiring salespeople who end up failing, or not reaching expectations, there is no doubt this information is extremely valuable (especially when you consider the cost involved with making a recruitment mistake and having to re-hire – which, as a conservative figure, has been noted as two-and-a-half times the basic annual salary of the employee).
As well as being able to have factual data in which to make hiring decisions, the candidate assessments also allows you to dramatically reduce the amount of time required for the recruitment process (as detailed here) – in that leaving the majority of the screening to automation, you won’t be wasting hours on viewing CVs and having lengthy phone interviews to determine suitability.
A sales-specific assessment versus a personality test
Wondering how exactly a sales-specific assessment is different to personality or psychometric testing? Check out the table below (courtesy of OMG):
