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Forget About Hiring Risks With A Sales Personality Test


Posted: 25th July 2017 09:33

Working in sales is a demanding profession, there is no catch all formula that will guarantee success for everyone. In fact, to be successful at selling an employee must demonstrate great self-awareness, assertiveness and a great deal of empathy and understanding for their prospective customers. Only by knowing their own strengths can salespeople begin using them and cultivate relationships. For example, if someone is excellent at cold calling, the sales industry might categorize them as a “hunter”, their strength may lie in making transactional sales, or promoting very specific items and services to fix a problem for the prospective buyer. On the other hand, farmers discover the overall needs of their customers, using that as a springboard for a lengthier conversation, or to make a larger sale by sowing seeds of trust.

While it’s important to have both sales types on board, there will be potential applicants or candidates that will quite simply – be neither. That can be a difficult thing to foresee especially when their resumes appear to be comprehensive, and their demeanor in interviews – strong. In practise however, the best sales people have a variety of qualities that make them suited to perform in a particular job. They are resourceful, flexible, passionate and unafraid of rejection. Before hiring, it’s important to take a hard look at what makes your present team solid, and compare applicants against that ideal profile.

One way to discover what exactly makes your team effective, and have that laid out for you simply so it may aid you in the hiring process, is ordering a sales personality test. Online sales assessment testing will measure a potential candidate’s traits that link to temperament and motivation, such as confidence, sociability, sense of urgency, dependence, emotional maturity and stamina while keeping the requirements of a specific position in mind. With a provider like SalesTestOnline that offers a 95% accuracy rate, the risk of hiring somebody unfit for the job is reduced significantly. It even speeds up the hiring process because after 10 minutes, managers already have a better sense of a candidate’s transparency. If needed, the results can be viewed by multiple members of your team as well – each position is assigned a main recruiter and co-recruiters if necessary.

Even the most experienced interviewer can be fooled by a job applicant's role-playing abilities. It’s challenging to be sure that the person meeting you for an interview will perform with the same vigour in 6 months time, at least not without some support. A personality test could be used as a hiring tool to provide that insight by mapping out an applicant’s strengths and weaknesses plainly for managers. It can even be used to show where new hires need to focus their energies in order to grow. Finally, it lowers training costs by pointing you in the direction of the most competent candidates, cuts employee turnover, and ultimately yields higher sales benefiting the entire company in the long term.