How can you find out if a sales candidate will be able to deliver as promised?

Everyone wants to recruit a great salesperson and we’ve all been there: Interviewing a natural extrovert, who is great at building relationships, takes control of the conversation, and persuades you that they are the right person for the job. The problem is, it’s frequently not true. It’s not unusual to have high churn in sales teams.

WasteRecruit have designed a skills-based assessment that can be used to test a candidate’s potential, whether they have previous experience in the sector or not. This significantly widens your candidate pool and focuses on candidate behaviour and skills, rather than previous experience and knowledge of the sector.

Our skills-based assessment really works and there’s a decent amount of science which backs it up.

The assessment enables us to test any candidate who applies for the role, which means we can effectively ditch the CV and focus purely on candidates who achieved the desired level of performance.

In brief, here’s what it looks like:

Candidates are presented with a variety of situations (including photos), some relating to pipeline management and some relating to non-pipeline management situations. They are given different options and asked which one best reflects how they would proceed.

The assessment can be benchmarked against an existing team, to ensure key values and behaviours are more heavily weighted than others. We do this because we know that some companies want their salespeople to approach the role in a slightly different way to others and we can adapt the assessment accordingly.

There are no clear right or wrong answers. As a result, this leads to choices that best align with their skills. It also gives us insight into how candidates will respond to those critical aspects of the role that determine successful outcomes and revenue generation.

WasteRecruit understands the challenges of business development and recruiting great sales people.

When recruiting for sales positions, you’ve got to pay to get someone who can hit the ground running, and that’s not always possible. Budgets are tight and paying someone more than existing team members can create issues.

Head hunting great salespeople who are typically well rewarded is tricky, and often they aren’t open to new opportunities unless they are unhappy with their package, the strategic direction of the business or don’t have a great relationship with their line manager.

This is why when recruiting for business development, it’s all about skills and behaviour.

WasteRecruit’s skills-based tool can help you recruit sales people who have the right skills to deliver on targets. Call 01252 353 080 or email [email protected] to find out how to recruit people that will increase the performance of your sales team and generate larger revenues.