Assessing SDR Candidates

Assessing SDR candidates is hard.

Even the best run interview processes are a kind of kabuki theater that don’t do a good job of predicting future success, but at least when trying to fill more senior roles, you have a corpus of work and historical performances to assess as well.

Not so with a more junior role like an SDR.

Since your SDR candidates are often recent college graduates, the references they provide may not have even overseen their work, let alone be able to speak to its quality.? If they have, there’s a good chance the reference is a relatively junior manager themselves and may not have the context to really know “what good looks like.”?

So if you don’t have a real work history to assess or references to use as confirmation, how can you maximize your chances of selecting a high performing candidate for your open SDR position?

You need to focus on measuring for potential, not experience, by asking structured questions measuring these five core areas:

1. Drive/Ambition
2. Conscientiousness
3. Aptitude/Intelligence
4. Growth Mentality/Coachability
5. Curiosity

At the risk of giving away some of my favorite interview questions, here are some great ways to measure these categories:

Drive/Ambition

H/T to Tyler Cowen - you can literally just ask people, “how ambitious are you?” and you’ll find that it’s actually surprisingly hard for people to fake their answer.

Additional questions that are effective:

• What makes you interested in pursuing (or continuing) a career in sales?
• What motivates your best on the job performance?
• (For current SDRs) If I contacted [CURRENT SALES LEADER] or hacked into your Salesforce instance today, in what position would I see you on the leaderboard?
• When was the last time you were competitive at work?

Conscientiousness

This refers to a specific category of the Big Five personality traits (which have mostly survived the replication crisis in psychology, unlike Myers-Briggs which is a horoscope for the workplace).??

Conscientiousness demonstrates awareness of the impact that their own behavior has on those around them. Conscientious people are generally more goal-oriented in their motives, ambitious in their academic efforts and at work, and feel more comfortable when they are well-prepared and organized.

So with that in mind, great questions for measuring this area include:

• What would you say is your “personal superpower?”
• Followed by, “since our strengths are so often just the flip side of the coin from our weaknesses, what would you say is your personal kryptonite, then?”
• What would you say is the biggest misconception you think people have about you?

Aptitude/Intelligence

Measuring aptitude (be it sales aptitude or more technical/role specific) and intelligence in a candidate can be difficult.

If possible, we highly recommend using a tool like Criteria Corp or PXT Select: A Wiley Brand to help you more objectively score this category area.

Growth Mentality/Coachability

Since we’re focused on selecting candidates for future potential, not past performance, measuring how coachable they are and how much growth mentality they posses, is critical.

Some questions to measure this area:

• When was the last time you sought out coaching or mentorship at work? What did the situation entail specifically?
• In or out of work, what is something you’re teaching yourself or going deeper on, right now?
• What do you think you’d need to change or improve upon in order to succeed in this new role?

Curiosity

Lastly, we recommend that you leave ample time in your candidate interview (30-50% of the allotted time) for their questions.? Not only is this critical, since candidate-company fit goes both ways, but you can literally measure how curious the candidate is by the caliber of questions they ask and what threads they pull.

Beware the SDR candidate who only asks a couple canned questions that they feel like they’re “supposed” to ask.

Nurturing your sense of curiosity can be a superpower for an SDR or seller.? When you have a candidate who just keeps digging deeper about what it’s like to work for the company, why your prospects buy from you, what updates are on the product roadmap, how you deal with competition, what your philosophy is as a leader, and more, you’re speaking to someone special.?

If you want to have a deeper discussion about how to better assess SDR candidates or need help setting up an interview process, get in touch with East Peak Advisors