03/02/2022
Thirty-five percent of sales hires fail within six months and over 50% fail within 12 months. The sales hiring process has remained unchanged for long enough to become a ritual. However, this ritual is not productive. In fact, no other division has such a high turnover rate or leaves as much to chance.
The recruiter or talent specialist will check the candidate’s experience in a 5-minute call while spending the end of the call coaching the candidate on how to get through the next round and how to land the job. Candidates may or may not be asked to take a test or assessment. Next, the candidate meets the hiring manager. Most of this step is about personality, company culture fit, and conversation skills. If the candidate is able to entertain or amuse them, or otherwise get the hiring manager to like them, he/she can likely get to the next step or even a job offer without ever answering a difficult question.
If you are an interviewer, ask yourself at the end of your process what do you learn about the candidates? What do you remember that demonstrates future success in each candidate? Did you take notes? Are they relevant?
The impacts of bias on hiring are nothing new; decades of research have been published on how bias impacts decision making for better or worse. The types of inherent bias are well-known: racial, socio-economic, educational or even age. Each act as a distraction from identifying the best attributes needed for success. Personal or professional referral, while rarely discussed and potentially less inherent, the expectations from an interviewer are lowered and the personal or professional politics cloud the judgement of the interviewer.
The issue is that a lack of control during the interview process allows bias into the decision-making activity. The Predictably hiring method uses market-research qualitative data collected in a user-friendly SaaS platform. The process is tailored to each client’s specific role and consists of questions, assessments, and other steps designed to identify true sales skills and capabilities for selling services or products. By providing a structured interview process, scoring remains consistent during each engagement, mitigating bias to accurately rank the candidate.
When I started hiring, I thought about the old saying “as long as the check cashes” and wondered why we don’t consider that in hiring? You don’t have to like the person, be an alum or have the same income or interests; what fundamentally matters is if they can close a deal. If you don’t have a way to control bias in your hiring process, can you really call it one?
