The sales recruitment process is a lot like a reality game show. In the beginning, you have a group of people eager to show their skills and earn a spot on your sales team’s roster. Throughout the interview and sales hiring process, candidates put their best foot forward to fight for immunity, or, in this case, a spot in the next round of interviews. The show—your recruitment process—only works if everyone gets a fair shake.
From reviewing applications to the first day on the job, every candidate who enters your hiring pipeline should overcome the same challenges and face the same opportunities. It’s up to the candidate to demonstrate their skill and be the last person standing. If the game was fixed, there wouldn’t be 45 seasons of Survivor.
How do you develop a consistent and fair hiring process? Before you can speed it up to help ensure you hire the right candidates, you first have to slow it down and analyze your sales hiring strategy. Here are the three things to make sure you have in your sales recruitment process.
1. Develop a Job Scorecard (Get C.R.I.S.P.)
Throughout the sales recruitment process, the scorecard acts as your North Star—your guide to great sales candidates.
Before you put out the call for resumes or reach out to a sales recruitment agency, take time to reflect and capture the skills and qualities that make a great sales candidate for your open position. Create an objective scorecard that awards points for each required skill. Your scorecard should be a reflection of the ad and award points for relevant skills. To keep it simple, we recommend awarding 10 points and having 10 requirements on your scorecard.
For example, the position you’re hiring for requires five years of outside sales experience and three years working with a CRM. If the candidate matches each requirement, they get a point. In the end, you’re left with an objective evaluation of the candidate’s core competencies.
When you work with Hire Me a Salesperson, we use our C.R.I.S.P. 18 method to evaluate every candidate that we recruit on your behalf. This objective scorecard model ensures the best possible candidates move forward in the sales recruitment process.
Here’s how C.R.I.S.P. 18 guarantees great sales hires:
- Consult and confirm the salesperson required to achieve your mission
- Recruit and review the best salespeople in our process to ensure they pass the benchmark
- Inspect and interview to narrow the selection to the best of the best
- Screen and select the top candidates
- Prepare the onboarding and coaching plan for the salesperson to achieve sales success quickly
- 18 steps along the way to find great sales hire through our objective process
2. Use an Assessment (A Sales One)
Not all assessments are the same and they don’t all measure the same things, just like every sales job is different and requires a unique set of competencies. Your favoured candidate may excel at knocking on doors and cold-calling prospects, but that skillset does not mean they will automatically succeed in a role centred around nurturing long-term client relationships.
Hiring inside sales? These salespeople face more pushback than others and must be resilient, show initiative, be analytical and close quickly. A customer service rep, by contrast, shines when upholding your company’s image, navigating difficult conversations and building rapport with your customers.
If you’re not sure what qualities your candidates need, our team of experienced sales managers and recruiters is here to help. At Hire Me a Salesperson, our detailed competency assessment give you the insight you need with objective scores tailored to the soft and hard skills suited to your unique job posting. This detailed screening process helps you funnel only the best candidates to the final round of interviews.
3. Ask Every Candidate the Same Questions (Identical Questions Every Time)
Now that you have your shortlist of candidates from the scorecard and sales assessment, it’s time to interview. In this stage, it’s critical that you ask everyone the same questions in the same order and in the same way. By staying consistent throughout every interview, the only variable left to analyze is the candidates’ responses.
When you better understand the core competencies candidates need to succeed and have a scorecard to evaluate their soft and hard skills—before asking the same questions in every interview, you front-load the sales recruitment process. The best salespeople anticipate hurdles before signing the contract and are adept at navigating an involved yet fair hiring procedure.
Just like contestants on your favourite reality game show, the candidates left standing at the end are those who have shown that they have what it takes to succeed.
Ready to supercharge your sales recruitment process? At Hire Me a Salesperson, we have decades of sales hiring and management experience. Contact us today to learn more about how we help you find your next great sales hire.