Sales recruitment can be majorly stressful for hiring managers. However, this need not be the case if they adopt the sales assessment. Bad hiring practices affect not only the productivity of a sales force but also the workplace environment.
Some CFOs (Chief Finance Officers) claim that bad hiring, there follows a lot of time and financial consumption. Around 17% of the HRs time is spent on poorly performing salespeople. There are many more interconnected layers of an organizational system that get disturbed due to bad hiring decisions.
Focusing only on the managers and sales team, it is clear that sales performance is greatly impacted by faults in the recruitment process. Therefore, a proper recruitment strategy must be planned before each hiring session.
HR managers/Recruiters often struggle with time management during the onboarding of the sales force. This doubles the pressure, as well as the risks of bad hires. Conducting a lengthy recruitment process is a gamble that can be fatal for your company.
Additionally, human resource managers are responsible for maintaining follow-ups on the candidates throughout the training period. This would require proper assessment through sales aptitude tests. Be cautious. It only takes a few neglected, bad hires to bring a year of deteriorating sales performance to your company.
Some challenges that HRs often face in sales recruitment
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Choosing Candidates Who Do Not Share A Common Goal
The salespeople are potential assets that channel clients into the service cycle. Enthusiasm to pitch a product or service to the clients is a ‘must have’ attitude of a salesperson. A lack of passion on the part of salespeople can adversely affect the channel of clients coming in for your business.
While assessing Resumes, managers tend to assume that all the applications received are from role-enthusiastic individuals. However, in reality, many candidates choose to put forth their profiles to click ‘by chance’ on the job.
Therefore, training, equipment, and development are essential to ensure output. This is to build interest and encourage the newly-hired sales reps to work in accordance with the company culture. We will discuss this briefly in the upcoming subsections.
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Elimination of Good Candidates
As hard as it seems, the hiring of salespeople can also go wrong due to the intuition bias that occurs in traditional job interviews. Due to this interview bias on the part of recruiters, many competent and interested candidates may lose the chance to contribute to the company’s growth.
A Glassdoor Survey states that 68% of the sales force switch jobs in a year, and 45% switch within three years. Eliminating passionate candidates during the hiring process might also bring uncertainty in employee retention, even when the candidates are provided with the best training materials.
You must uncover their potential and soft skills along with the obvious experience or qualifications. You will never know when you will lose a perfectly-fit candidate to biased and old-fashioned recruitment processes.
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Overlooking Interactive Experience and Prioritizing Qualifications
The next biggest hiring fault is getting swayed by the excellent academic performance of the candidate. The role of sales requires the ability of individuals to switch from facts to common sense really fast and smoothly. And not everyone has a talent for communicating in this way.
A productive sales force requires members who are street-smart as well as bookish. And not just overachievers but also learners. While conducting a traditional job interview, competent candidates may be missed out due to discrimination based on qualification, language difference, gender, and caste of the individual.
But there is good news. Recruitment patterns are changing by emphasizing quality over quantity. According to the latest SHRM updates, employers are actively seeking soft skills like dependability, teamwork, flexibility, and problem-solving in their future employees.
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Not The Right Training
A report published by Monster says 63% of hiring managers are willing to hire candidates with transferable soft skills and train them to full efficiency from scratch. After hiring salespeople, it is necessary to carry out specialized training for the candidates.
This training often consists of polishing basic soft skills, imparting industry knowledge, and enhancing technical proficiency. The traditional selection of salespeople depends solely upon the memory and impression of the recruiter, and no scientific data about the candidate is recorded.
Customizing training programs becomes difficult in such cases, as the company does not have adequate information about the candidate’s weaknesses and strengths. Since the skills to acquire knowledge typically vary in individuals, the success of training programs remains uncertain.
Securing Sales Recruitment With Advanced HR Tech
As mentioned before, the base of a well-structured sales team starts with proper sales recruitment. Identification, screening, and further detailed evaluation of competent sales candidates can benefit recruiters in many ways.
The new generation is discarding the old hiring method through one-to-one interaction and lengthy written assessments as it lacks attractive features and engagement components in the evaluation process.
Thrive reports 68% of recruiters today believe in using the recruitment fund to access advanced hiring tools. Sales behavioral assessments have become increasingly popular as they reduce managers’ difficulties during the interview stage of sales recruitment.
Why must Psychometric Sales Assessments be considered for sales recruitment?
It is simply to assess the right sales competencies of the individual candidate. You can also refer to the blog on Digital Assessments For Sales Competencies to understand these assessments better. Such assessments are highly sales-oriented and open to role-related customization at various phases of the business.
These assessments screen the basic behavioral requirements of a potential salesperson. Also, they test the resilience and conscientiousness of the candidate through questions. These help the managers develop a stable frontline sales profile with the right attitude and aptitude.
Characteristic of Visual Psychometric Sales Test
- It is visually interactive and hooks candidates till the end of the questionnaire
- It is fun to attend with realistic scenarios and excellent graphics
- It is easy to understand and attend to; devoid of exaggerated vocabulary
- It is feasible from anywhere and everywhere with an internet connectivity base
- It calculates the results and creates an accurate analysis of the candidate
- It assesses important sales competencies of the candidates: Perspective Taking, Positivity, Motivation, and Ambiversion
- It is culturally and regionally neutral
- It has no language barrier
- It is quick and time-saving
Benefits of Psychometric Pre-assessments
- Bias-free analysis of the candidate
- Determine what training must follow to make optimal use of their potential
- Records candidate reports in real-time to assess their progress through a period of employment
- It saves ample time on the recruiter’s part as well
- Uses Digitally advanced techniques that will attract more potential Gen-Z candidates
- Provides economically and environmentally sustainable reports with easy cloud access
- Provides reliable and trustworthy reports of the candidate profile
- Helps hire a fresh team of salespeople that share the firm’s goals
- Helps build an actively-contributing sales team
Sum Up
The faster you acquaint yourself with the Sales Assessment, the better you can perform sales recruitment. Technology today can accompany and automate the entire sales process and management. You can use this assessment to handle a pool of potential sales reps, train your new hires, or manage the frontline of your sales flawlessly and efficiently.
You can now secure your position from the base of recruitment with PMaps psychometric assessments. Reach out to us on our website or email, or call us. And we can ensure that you will hire right with your next round of sales hires.
Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Pexels; Thank you!
