Avoiding the Million-Dollar Hiring Mistake

Sales leaders are acutely aware of how painful a wrong hiring decision can be.  When you calculate the fully-loaded cost of recruiting, onboarding, training, coaching, and compensating an employee who ends up chronically struggling in role, the numbers can quickly add up to hundreds of thousands in sunk costs.

Of course for sales roles, there is a double-whammy as well. In addition to the direct hiring and training costs that are lost, there are often even greater indirect, opportunity costs that arise when an underperforming rep’s territory goes under-covered, and its revenue potential goes unrealized.  In some industries, these costs can quickly skyrocket into the millions.

The point is, hiring right matters a lot. It matters in general, but it especially matters in sales. And while there is no sure-fire way to accurately pinpoint superstar seller potential for every position you fill, we’ve seen many sales organizations becoming more systematic in their approaches.

So how are they engineering greater comprehensiveness into their hiring processes? The key is to move away from thinking of candidate assessment as a binary, yes-no test, and more toward thinking of it more as a 360-degree evaluation that results from multiple, distinct inputs. For example, if you think of the selection process at your organization as a pie chart, you might aim to have an allocation that looks something like this:

25% credentials-based criteria you can assess by a resume scan (years of experience, specific degrees, etc.)
20% organizational fit, high-level qualifications and capabilities, professionalism, and salary expectation based criteria that can be tested in an initial screening interview conducted by a recruiter.
30% deeper dive on specific capabilities and skills that lead to success as defined in your competency model, and as determined through behavioral based interviews.
25% personality and critical thinking skills that lead to working well on a team, being less likely to leave, be less likely to behave unethically, etc., which can be tested with a pre-hire assessment.

The above percentages may of course change based on your organization’s need. And for particularly critical roles such as line management, outside references or even scenario-based role-play assessments might be worth throwing into the mix. But regardless of the allocation you select, members tells us that a key factor is that these assessments be used not just to determine whether or not a candidate is a good fit for the position they’ve currently applied for, but also to begin to gauge how they might perform in the next position, should they stay with the organization longer term. This is particularly critical in sales, where many sellers end up lacking the fundamentals needed to succeed in management roles.

While none of these methods offer guarantees, many members tell us that they see a strong relationship between the rigor of their hiring practices and the success rates of their new hires. In fact, to help members build that rigor and improve success rates, SEC is currently developing a new product that can assess candidates to determine their propensity for high performance given your selling environment, assessing particularly for Challenger skills. For more information, please click here to send an e-mail to our product development team, who would be more than happy to have your input as we design the final product.

Have you taken all the steps you can to build a well-rounded hiring process? How does your organization’s approach to job candidate assessment compare to the above?