Incorporating Assessments Into Your Sales Recruitment Campaign
High turnover impacts on an organization's bottom line
, particularly in sales. This is because customer loyalty tends to be compromised when the salespeople that they have developed relationships with leave an organization.
The problem for recruiters is that the key to effective sales recruitment decisions is being able to predict future sales performance. By fine tuning the selection process to pick up on key sales skills, behaviors and motivators, their hiring decisions can be improved.
Salespeople will generally fall into one of two categories "hunters", who find new business, and "farmers" who gain revenue from existing accounts. Regardless of the category of salespeople, the sales environment today is more challenging than ever, and sales managers will likely be faced with the following issues:
* Having an effective sales recruitment campaign to find the right salespeople to cope with the challenges of the modern business environment
* Building the skills set of salespeople to overcome an increasingly sceptical customer base
* Motivating and retaining good salespeople
* Predicting good sales performers
Traditionally, sales managers and even professional recruiters have relied purely on unstructured interviews by way of predicting future sales performers and hence selecting their new recruits.
However interviews are notoriously poor predictors of on-the-job performances, with most having a predictive validity of not more than 14 %, according to scientific studies.
By incorporating psychometric assessments and structured interview techniques into your sales recruitment campaign, you can obtain objective measures of the following:
* Your candidates' intellectual capacity to 'think on their feet' and cope with demanding sales situations
* Their communication skills and their ability to relate effectively with customers
* Aspects of motivation which are essential to keep salespeople performing at their peak Personality measures as predictors of sales performance
Probably more than any other job role, personality is important in predicting a person's 'fit' for a role in sales, and hence future sales performance.
This is because sales relies so much on such personality factors as interpersonal skills; relating to and understanding customers (emotional intelligence); and stress resilience (which is important in coping with the inevitable sales rejections).
Therefore a great assessment tool that can be incorporated into a sales recruitment campaign is a personality profile questionnaire. There are many different personality assessments on the market, some of which have more predictive validity than others, so it's important to gain professional advice on an appropriate and valid tool which you can use.
Some of the measures you will obtain by using a personality assessment tool in your recruitment processes include:
* Emotional intelligence
* Interpersonal skills
* Stress resilience
* Planning and organizing ability
* Drive
* Attention to detail
A sales recruitment strategy incorporating a combination of structured interviews, ability and aptitude tests and personality profiling, will improve the quality of your selection decisions.
It's a matter of identifying which competencies you would like to measure, and then selecting assessment tools which will most accurately measure these competencies.
by: Tim Williams
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