Now that you have your competency model built for hiring salespeople, it is now time to identify those candidates that display the behaviors you are seeking. There are many assessments out there, but we use The Devine Inventory and have assessed thousands of candidates. We know it gives us good data.
We look at these assessments as a whole, but we must break them into parts as well. Here’s an example… A person scores high in Ambition and Drive, but they score lower in Takes Action, and Self-Responsibility. What we see here based on the scores is someone who wants to be the best, but they don’t want to pay the price to get there (Takes Action). They want to be the best, but the cards are stacked against them (Self-Responsibility). Certainly during the interview, we would want to get evidence from the candidate concerning these competencies. So, if the Takes Action score is low, we will certainly want to find out during the interview why. Is it something that is fairly easy to correct, or is it going to take a lot of time and energy. It is possible this candidate could have been managed by a person who would not allow any freedom or creativity, every time they tried to do something on their own they got in trouble. On the other hand, they might be indecisive, or they don’t like change, or they are not responsible. These would all be red flags for a salesperson. All of this can be revealed during the interview process using the Assessment as an X-Ray not only as a TEST.
If assessments are used properly and we use them as a tool to help guide us during the interview, they are a fantastic resource.