Recruitment Roulette

Recruitment Roulette – Are you a player?

Whatever your business spends money on needs to offer a good return on investment.

It’s the same when recruiting a new salesperson!

Forget Casinos, bookmakers’ shops or online Bingo – recruiting someone into your salesforce is a gamble.

Every day, businesses across the world employ:

• Salespeople who can’t sell
• Customer service staff who frustrate customers
• Managers who can’t manage

But your company doesn’t have to be part of this group! By adopting a sustainable recruitment process, you put your business far ahead of the competition.

Hiring your effective salesforce

You need to be sure that your new recruit is going to be effective for your company.

Every time you recruit a new sales executive, you’re taking a £10,000+ gamble. Therefore, if you use the same-old tried and tested methods, such as…

• CV
• Reference Check
• Interview

… then the odds of you getting the right person are one in four.

You want to make sure that you’re using your company’s money wisely. If you are in charge of hiring for the sales team, you need to hire candidates that give your company the best possible chance of success.

Would you place a bet of £10k with a one in four chance of winning? Probably not.

Isn’t recruiting the wrong salesperson just bad luck?

People ask me this question a lot. Many people believe that ‘revolving doors’ is the norm for a sales department – but it doesn’t have to be this way!

Sometimes, recruiting the wrong salesperson is bad luck. But most of the time, it isn’t.

If you know how, you can reduce the amount of ‘chance’ involved and increase the amount of success. The more effort you put into getting your recruitment right, the more you ‘load the dice’ in your favour.

One method of improving your success further is to use psychometric assessments. Some ‘hardened’ managers believe that psychometric assessments have limited value in the recruitment process – especially (for some reason) in sales and telesales. But this isn’t true.

If you want your sales recruits to be successful, you benefit from considering psychometrics in your hiring process.

Why assessments?

Psychometric assessments are crucial for you to achieve success from new recruits. You face many challenges when hiring new staff.

This is because:

• 2 out of 3 recruits disappoint in the first year
• 95% of applicants ‘exaggerate’ to get a job
• 63% of interviewers judge a candidate within 5 minutes

If your salesforce is going to be successful, you need to address these factors. All of the above cost your business money – and can be avoided!

If you want to reduce your staff turnover, assessments are crucial. People who fit the role they were recruited for, as well as the company, are more engaged. This means that they stay longer at your company – reducing your recruitment costs and increasing productivity.

Research also shows that businesses with engaged employees:

• Are 51% more productive[1]
• Outperform companies with unsatisfied staff by 20-28%[2]
• Have a 19% increase in operating income over 12-months[3]

In another study, companies with 60-70% employee engagement had an average total shareholder’s return of 24.2%. On the other hand, businesses with 49-60% employee engagement had an average total shareholder’s return of 9.1%. Companies with engagement below 25% suffered negative TSR[4].

Does it take a long time?

Your psychometric assessment doesn’t have to be a painfully slow process.

Assessments no longer involve lengthy paper-and-pencil completion or a time-consuming evaluation of the responses. Likewise, you don’t need an expensively trained practitioner to receive benefits.

Modern psychometrics are:

• Completed and evaluated online
• Reported back within minutes of completion
• With the interviewer minutes after completion

Minutes after completion your assessment is with the interviewer, highlighting any areas for concern and suggesting questions. That way, your interview can probe the candidate’s response – and get the best outcome.

Improving your odds

You need to improve the odds of a successful hire.

Using assessments, combined with a job profile (benchmark), improve your chances of success from 26% to 75%.

Psychometric assessments measure a candidate’s profile against a profile for the sales role they have applied for. This role profile is based on current top performers in the role.

That way, you are identifying what success looks like – so you can recruit more success!

Great People Inside assessments:

• Only measure the things you care about
• Help you recruit the right sales staff
• Improve the performance of existing staff

You benefit from our assessments through the process of ‘job matching’. This allows you, as the employer, to match candidate profiles to the agreed profile for the job.

Adding this significantly improves the likelihood of your company recruiting the right person, first time around.

Protect your money – hire the right people

For you to recruit the right person for a role, you need all the best resources available to you. This means that whilst the traditional methods of…

• CV
• Interview
• Gut feeling

… still play a part, you can back these up with effective psychometric evaluation. This saves your business thousands of pounds each year.

Great People Inside is the world’s leading provider of customised sales assessments. We offer proven successful assessments to help you get your sales recruitment right.

If you want to know more about the ‘Dimensions’ psychometric assessment, and how it can help your company to measure every potential recruit’s suitability before they join your sales team, then email me at [email protected] or call 01494 573 572.

[1] (Harter, J.K., Schmidt, F.L., & Hayes T.L., Psychology, 2002 Vol. 87, No. 2)

[2] (The Conference Board, 2006)

[3] (Towers Perrin, 2008)

[4] (Employee engagement at double-digit growth companies, Hewitt Research Brief)