How to Evaluate & Assess Sales Candidates

TalentSorter StaffEmployee Assessment Tools, Hiring for Fit, HR Technology, Ideal Candidate Report, Salesperson Hiring

Hiring your best salespeople

Get Your Sales Team Revving with a Better Hiring Tool

Do you need to inject new life into your sales engine? Has your sales team lost its mojo?

Hiring new people won’t always reinvigorate a department. Hiring the wrong people can even make it worse. You know that when you post for a sales job, you get that flood of resumes that leaves you feeling like you are looking for a needle in a haystack.

Have you ever wondered why some of your folks are such reliable producers while others just never break out, regardless how much training and coaching you give them? The ability to identify the DNA of the future success of a sales candidate is crucial for finding the right person to join your sales team. Without it, you may find yourself making a hiring decision that results in onboarding candidates that are not the appropriate fit for the job. In the past, many companies would administer a sales assessment test at the final stage in the hiring process, which may not have included a full behavior assessment, and hiring mistakes would happen.

So the question remains: 

How do you find the best salesperson for the job?

Evaluating a person’s sales skills requires having a good understanding of their personality and what their behaviour will be like on the job. It can be difficult to identify the most important characteristics and attributes a salesperson in your company needs to be successful, but there are ways to do so by simply improving your hiring protocols.

A resume will not tell you about a person’s behavior: their reliability, integrity, ethics, commitment and drive. Or how they build client rapport. Their experience will show you what they have done – not who they are.

Sales Aptitude Assessment Method

It is essential for hiring managers to use an evaluation method that uncovers what the person is really like. This can be accomplished through education, observation, formal training, interviewing past colleagues and managers, or of course, personal experience. But what if there was an easier way? What if you could really get to know and understand someone before reading their resume or committing to an interview? Being able to assess the attributes of an ideal salesperson candidate early in the hiring process can ensure that great candidates are not overlooked even if you would not have thought they were a top candidate by just reviewing their resume.  

What To Look For In A Sales Candidate

To hire a star performer for your organization, you need to know what kind of salesperson you need. There are many different types of sales functions – from cold calling to account mining, short or long sales cycles, etc. Identifying which behaviours drive success in your specific role is critical and uncovering those attributes and behaviours early in the recruitment process can streamline your hiring process. 

One way you can uncover what creates success is by assessing your current star performers with an effective personality and assessment tool to easily understand what makes them so good at what they do. After all, you want to hire more of that!

Hiring Tools: Sales Assessment 

An effective sales assessment is an essential tool used in the screening process to determine if a candidate is a good fit for how sales is done at a particular company. Assessment results give potential employers an objective evaluation of the candidates’ personality, behaviours, and other insights that can ensure that the best candidates are brought in for interviews.

There are many kinds of tests that determine strengths, weaknesses, and other factors that qualify a candidate for a specific position in a company. Choosing the right tool and how to understand and utilize that information throughout the candidate’s review process is critical.

Some assessment tests give a much more in-depth look into a person’s personality and important factors like how resilient they are and how rejection will impact them or if they are open and like being with people. Your organization will benefit greatly from understanding more about the person behind the resume before offering a job.

A great job fit means higher retention, employee satisfaction and superstar sales results for you. 

Bottom Line

Employers like you need to evaluate three key attributes in a sales candidate: personality, sales skills, and client relations. It is important to note that personality and skills are distinctly different yet can often be confused. Using the right assessment tool can significantly improve your ability to evaluate a candidate’s sales skills and most importantly their behavioral traits and accelerate your recruitment and hiring process.


If you would like to learn more about using assessment tools for recruiting qualified sales candidates, TalentSorter offers resources and services that will help streamline your hiring process. Visit this link:

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