Finding the ideal sales hire in a pool of candidates can be difficult, time-consuming, and costly. But getting it right is vital for sales performance and overall culture.
Understanding role and company fit is tricky. Even the most advanced AI resume screening and interview questions can provide only a glimpse of candidate experience and aptitude.
Sales hiring assessments can save you time and effort as well as improve results. Not only can pre-employment tests help predict job performance, but they can give valuable insights into the core selling abilities of potential candidates.
This post looks at how sales hiring assessments can streamline your selection process and make it more effective.
5 Benefits of Sales Hiring Assessments
This list of benefits certainly isn’t exhaustive, but it will give you an idea of what improvements or changes you may see after adding sales assessment tools to your interview process.
1. Higher Quality Hires
One of the biggest benefits of using hiring assessments for sales is the ability to identify talent earlier in the process. This means that, by the time your hiring managers become involved, they have a smaller pool of candidates to wade through. They can get a shortlist of skilled candidates who are likely to be a good fit for the team and the company and have the skills and personality traits likely to bring value to the organization.
2. Lower Turnover Rate
High sales turnover can be costly in terms of lost business, onboarding, sales training investment, and recruiting fees. Team morale is also often damaged when a coworker leaves shortly after being hired.
By assessing candidates’ hard and soft skills with a personality test, you can eliminate the potential for a bad hire immediately. Hiring assessment testing allows you to make sure those who are a good match for the team and the company’s culture are put at the front of the line. Better fit means better employee retention.
3. Improved Productivity
When properly implemented, sales hiring tests can help predict candidate performance. Test results of high-quality candidates will show they have the driving forces, behaviors, consultative selling skills, and acumen to succeed in your environment and achieve sales targets.
4. Streamlined Hiring Process
One of the biggest challenges of the selection process is how long and resource-intensive it can be. On average, a newly posted position takes about 45 days to fill and only a small portion of job openings are filled within the first month.
This isn’t because there aren’t enough people applying for jobs. The problem is the enormous pool of potentially qualified candidates that apply. This makes it incredibly challenging for hiring managers to regulate applicant flow and identify candidates from within a massive number of applications.
Setting up opportunities for the applicants to differentiate themselves is crucial to making the hiring process simpler. Not only can sales hiring tests give the hiring team objective data about candidates, but they can also screen out less-qualified candidates.
5. Better Team Synergy
Resumes and interviews can be poor predictors of how someone will fit in with your team. You can use assessments to gather as much relevant information as possible during the selection process. This data can be used to identify candidates’ behavior and communication preferences. It’s a scientifically validated way to ensure that your selection process leads to the candidate who will be a cultural fit and a smart talent acquisition.
Common Assessment Methods for Sales Hiring
Sales hiring assessment tests are pre-employment evaluation tools used by companies to assess a candidate’s skills, abilities, and personality traits relevant to a sales role. These tests aim to measure various competencies such as cognitive abilities, sales aptitude, personality characteristics, and job-specific knowledge.
The results of these assessments help companies make more informed hiring decisions and identify candidates who are likely to excel in the sales position.
Combination Assessments
The Brooks Talent Index®/sup> combines four validated sales hiring assessment tools to measure and analyze individual behaviors, driving forces, competencies, and acumen. This comprehensive assessment reveals sales professionals’ selling skills, working styles, communication preferences, driving forces, and acumen to help sales leaders hire, train, coach, and retain the best team.
Cognitive Ability Tests
Cognitive ability tests, also known as general or specialized aptitude tests, are a common way for talent acquisition teams to measure verbal reasoning, math skills, and more. Some of the more extensive cognitive tests deal more with memory, problem-solving, and even attention to detail or numerical dexterity.
AI Screening
Asynchronous interviews, or video submissions, have grown in popularity considerably. Applicants record themselves answering questions, allowing interviewers to evaluate them at their own pace. AI facial recognition can be used to provide insight into the applicant’s tone, vocabulary, and more.
Job Trials
Job trials are on-the-spot evaluations of a skill by the interviewer or hiring manager. It’s a simulation of the actual job ahead. A modern version of this is the use of situational interview questions in which candidates are given hypothetical examples and asked about their reactions or behavioral questions that ask the candidate to describe a specific situation and how they handled it.
How Sales Talent Assessments Help You Avoid Common Hiring Mistakes
Hiring mistakes can cost you an enormous amount of time and effort. They also affect team morale and slow down your momentum. Assessing a candidate’s skills and personality before hiring can help you decide whether they’re a good fit for your corporate culture.
Find the Right Candidates
Pre-employment testing can weed out less-qualified or misleading applicants and help you identify those with both the hard and soft skills to be an asset to your existing team.
Understand Candidate Motivators
Assessments reveal what motivates candidates so sales managers can incentivize them properly and give sales managers insight into how to appropriately coach and develop.
Shorten a Long Process
The shorter the hiring cycle, the less of an impact the vacancy has on sales results and the overall organization.
Avoid Mis-Hires
Talent assessment tools can help you avoid sales hiring mistakes by highlighting knowledge gaps, uncovering communication styles, or revealing other factors that mean a candidate would be a better fit at another company.
Build a Compatible Team
Talent assessment tools can help your organization evaluate skills and capabilities as well as the attributes of someone who is likely to get along with your team.
Contact us to find out how our sales assessment solutions can help you select, train, and retain high-performing salespeople.
