HIRING
Don’t Waste Millions of Dollars on Bad Sales Hires
MIKE KUNKLE
Making poor hiring decisions is expensive. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) suggests that replac- ing a bad hire costs 30 percent of their total com- pensation. Considering opportunity loss, I’ve seen replacement costs as high as a million per person in an enterprise B2B complex sales environment. That’s a painful reality. So how can you minimize it?
The solution is a sales hiring system. In this article, I’ll highlight just a few of the eight key components in my sales hiring system. If you’re interested in exploring them in detail, you’ll find a link at the end of this article.
ASSESSING COMPETENCIES & TRAITS
Determining the competencies (skills and behaviors) needed for sales success
in each of your roles is foundational. So list them all and create a library. It’s OK that some roles may overlap and other competencies may be unique. It’s also important to determine the traits (e.g., attributes, characteristics, and mindsets) required to support the above competencies and thrive in your various sales roles. Selling requires certain mindsets and traits – more like being an Olympic athlete
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than an accountant. These desired traits may also vary by role. These competencies and traits inform virtually every other component of the sales hiring system. Use them as you build job descriptions, design interviews, and configure a statistically-validated hiring assessment you select to evaluate candidates.
INTERVIEWING: BEHAVIORAL & HYPOTHETICAL
As you move into the interviewing and selection phase of hiring, the tendency is to look at things more subjectively. However, this is where staying rooted to our foundational competencies and traits can make a huge impact.
Behavioral interviewing is a well- established, effective, yet underutilized method for hiring. Behavioral questions ask the candidate to share experiences that can reveal strengths or weaknesses within your competencies. A simple example: “Tell me about a time you couldn’t
get a response from a key prospect, and what you finally did to break through
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