Ever made a bad hire? Be honest now. If you’re like most sales managers, you hired Fred on Friday, only to wish two weeks later you had picked Wayne from Wednesday’s interview. Fred seemed great in the interview, but somehow between the offer and his first day on the job he forgot how to sell.
A bad hire is terribly expensive. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, it will cost you one-third to one-half of Fred’s annual salary to replace him. And these numbers don’t reflect the intangibles such as lost customers, lost knowledge and increased ramp time. But if you don’t make a change to get Fred off the bus, then he’ll likely quit anyway. The Harvard Business Review says 80 percent of turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions.
Here’s why your current style of selecting a new sales rep doesn’t work. Let’s pretend you need to hire a great account manager to call on resellers. Your recruiting department advertises for an “Experienced Sales Representative” with (insert fluffy requirements here) and ends up sending you four candidates: Katelyn, Jerome, Mindi and Reggie. But … here’s what you DON’T know:
- Katelyn is the only one of the candidates who can actually sell, but she hasn’t interviewed in years and her résumé looks terrible.
- Jerome doctored his résumé and is extremely seductive in his hyperbole.
- Mindi has read every sales book she could get her hands on but is really a marketing assistant and has never closed a deal.
- Reggie, who has never carried a quota, has been professionally coached on interviewing skills for several weeks. His well-rehearsed answers will blow you away.
Your challenge is to spot the impostors and pick out the one candidate who can hit the ground running. Do you have enough confidence in your interviewing skills you’re sure you won’t be fooled? Are you willing to bet half of their annual salary that you can? Do you think your standard “what is your greatest strength and weakness?” interview question will ferret out the top sales person? How about this gem: “Why do you think you’re right for this job?” Those questions should have been retired when people stopped smoking pipes at their desks.
Guessing on a candidate is about as good as putting all your money on clubs at the roulette wheel. Actually it’s worse! A study conducted by John and Rhonda Hunter at the University of Michigan on the predictors of job performance found that a typical job interview increased the likelihood of choosing the best candidate by less than 2 percent. Sure, you can increase that to 55 percent by using “behavioral interviewing,” but that’s still not good enough.
So how do you significantly increase the odds of getting the right person in the seat without breaking the bank on a professional recruiter (and that isn’t a guarantee either)?
Well, the answer is more straightforward than you may think. If you were a swim coach and wanted to select a team, you wouldn’t ask them their greatest swimming strength or weakness. You’d ask everyone to jump in the water and race against the clock. You would also analyze their stroke in the water. If you were an editor, you’d ask potential reporters for a sampling of the articles they had actually written. You may even ask them to write a paragraph on the spot.
But you’re a sales manager, so you make them sell!
Yes, it’s a simple answer … but difficult to execute, and that’s why few companies actually go through the trouble of restructuring their hiring processes.
A strong hiring process that really tests sales talent, such as MarketStar’s SalesStarTM Assessment Center, takes candidates through a litany of exercises, designed to measure their performance in real-world, selling situations (including pressure).
Here’s a sampling of a few Assessment Center techniques you’ll want to consider:
| Assessment Center Module | Designed to test: |
| Predictive Indexing | Whether the candidate fits into general behavioral patterns, specific to the job. |
| Letter to the CEO | The ability of the candidate to write a clear, concise, persuasive and grammatically correct, C-level business letter. |
| Group Introduction | The chemistry of the candidate as they try to establish a connection with a new group (and make themselves memorable). |
| Sales Scenario | The selling skills of the candidate by making them sell a product live (or over the phone if this is an inside sales position) to an end customer or reseller. |
| Q&A with Potential Colleague | Whether the company is a right fit for the candidate (it goes both ways). |
| Behavioral-Based Interviews | Responses to a variety of real-life situational questions. |
A typical Assessment Center will last two or three hours and run candidates through a gauntlet of activities. From the time they walk in the door, candidates are constantly being assessed and scored. Even the questions they ask about the company or how they interact with the other candidates (in the group modules) is a good indicator of their thinking processes and overall persona.
MarketStar clients who have used this system have seen dramatic results in terms of lower employee turnover, increased sales and greater employee satisfaction. And the unexpected bonus is that managers, working in teams to assess candidates, learn from each other and feel much more engaged in the hiring process.
For more information on MarketStar’s SalesStar Assessment Centers, contact us at pstout@marketstar.com.
