During the typical hiring process, employers aim to gather as much important information on the candidates as is possible. The problem that a number of sales managers or recruiters encounter, however, is that traditional methods of gleaning information on candidates (resumes and interviews, primarily) often don’t offer up the right — or even correct — insight. The typical resume is notoriously unreliable. Research shows that up to 78% of resumes include misleading information, while 46% contain outright lies. Interviews — especially those that re unstructured — are subjective, and in the end, serve as poor predicters of job performance.
Conversely, a sales personality test is a far more reliable and objective way to pre-screen candidates and gather useful and accurate information. A test provided by a trustworthy assessment company will measure the natural underlying personality trait drives of each candidate and assess their suitability for the position. Experts in the assessment field, such as those at www.salestestonline.com, a software-as-service provider that has been offering customized sales assessment tests for 30 years, tell us that there are 5 primary personality trait drives:
- Assertiveness
- Sociability
- Patience
- Dependence
- Emotional Control
These traits, together, determine a given person’s “sales style” should you decide to hire them.
A sales assessment test allows you not only to customize your interview to better determine the candidate’s fit for the position, but it also allows you to customize your training and management post-hire in order to speed up the new recruit’s blossoming to full potential.If hired, the results of the sales personality test will provide insight into any weak areas (potential red flags) that might require special attention by the new hire’s immediate supervisor. In addition, the test results can be used to match the new recruit with the best sales supervisor on hand.
A sales assessment test introduces much needed objectivity into a hiring process that is often mired by subjectivity and pretense. By providing concrete results including suitability ratings that can be standardized across all applicants, sales managers and recruiters can then use the information to make more defensible — and better informed — hiring decisions.
Companies that use sales assessment testing experience tangible positive impacts. The two most common concerns during the hiring process are that businesses and recruiters are spending far too much time on hiring, and yet are still making more costly hiring mistakes than they can actually afford. Online sales personality tests can help directly with each of these major pain points — first, by dramatically reducing the time spent poring over resumes and conducting interviews, and second, by making training and role selection even more efficient, thereby reducing turnover.
Reducing turnover can have widespread benefits that ripple through your organization. Lower turnover rates not only boost overall morale and raise company reputation, but it also makes it easier to attract and hire better candidates in the future. Reducing turnover also leads to more concrete reduction in cost. Some of the expenses associated with replacing an employee include recruitment, selection, training, and occasionally severance pay for the employee’s departure. All of these costs can be reduced with pre-interview sales assessment testing.
By providing reliable, objective data that actually predicts job performance and sales role efficiency, a sales assessment test increases the quality of a hire and reduces the number of overall bad hires, both of which lead to improvements in workforce productivity, reduce turnover, and improve the bottom line for any company.