THE IDEAL RECRUIT FOR COMPETITIVE SALES POSITIONS – by Chris Gee, PhD.

Welcome to week #7 of our blog series on the predictive characteristics of successful competitive sales hires. For those of you who may have just found this blog series, the six characteristics that were covered are: (1) Coming from a Warm Referral Source; (2) Being Employed at the Time of Applying; (3) Possessing at least 3 Years of Competitive Sales Experience; (4) Previous Job Stability, (5) Working > 45 Hours per Week and (6) Believe in What You Are Selling.

Unlike the previous installments which have focused on individual characteristics, this blog highlights the cumulative impact that these predictive attributes have on a candidate’s probability for success and retention within sales careers. As the previous blogs clearly illustrated, each of these attributes is independently predictive of success and retention; however, their cumulative impact is far greater. That is to say, the more of these characteristics a candidate possesses, the greater their average future productivity and likelihood of being retained.

Therefore, irrespective of the attributes themselves, simply having more of them is by far the most predictive element of this ideal recruiting profile. Nevertheless, clients have always asked for the order of importance of these attributes. Using regression analyses (which assess a construct’s independent predictive power), below is the list in order of statistical importance:

  1. Warm Referral Source
  2. Previous Sales Experience
  3. Consumer of Product / Service
  4. Being Employed at Time of Application
  5. Job Stability
  6. Working >= 45 Hours per Week

With respect to the ROI associated with recruiting to this demographic profile, the top and bottom-line implications are astonishing (and important here, this is irrespective of any other recruiting data points…). Using our sample company comprised of 100 sales reps, most organizations have the following distribution of recruits:

35% with 4 or more traits; 65% with 3 or fewer

Average 1st Year Production: $200,000

Average Cost of Hiring / Training / Onboarding: $20,000

If company A was to re-select the 65% of hires with 3 or fewer traits as ideal recruits (those with 4 or more), the organizational impact would be:

65 reps x $244,000 in additional Year 1 production = $14,560,000

13 additional reps retained @ $20,000 in savings = $260,000

For a grand total ROI of $14,820,000

An almost $15M lift for a company of 100 sales reps, simply by recruiting and selecting candidates who possess a more robust ideal candidate profile. This clearly illustrates the predictive power of recruitment analytics and the impact that strategic and targeted recruiting can have on your organization’s top and bottom lines. It is important to remember that these are biographical screening characteristics, which have the potential to change over time and across environments (e.g., remote work experience became a strong predictor during the COVID – 19 pandemic). As such, while they are a crucial component of a “best practices” recruitment strategy, they should be considered as supplementary and secondary to the more robust and predictive psychometric constructs contained within a validated selection assessment like the Predictor of Potential (POP™). In short, the source traits measured through the POP™ should be considered as “must haves”, while these demographic factors are “nice to haves”.

Due to the incredible feedback and response that we have received throughout this blog series, we are excited to announce an encore week #8 edition of the series, which will highlight how adding these screening traits to a predictive psychometric assessment like the Predictor of Potential (POP™) can take your screening and selection process to the next level. Don’t miss out, as this final installment will highlight how this robust methodology not only increases your predictive selection power, but also influences things such as candidate experience, recruiter ROI and the ability to empirically leverage emerging technologies like AI and resume parsing services…..

Stay Tuned.