Understanding – What Ditch Diggers and Salespeople Have in Common!
Understanding – What Ditch Diggers and Salespeople Have in Common!
“Using competency-based, job-specific assessment technology is an absolute must for anyone looking to up-level their hiring. Getting beyond the interview and into the heart and soul of your candidates can give you a truer gauge of can they do the job and thrive as a member of your team.
With a recession comes an increased need to hire and to protect every dollar by lessening the risk of turnover. Assessment technology…has shown time and time again how you can get in front of the eight-ball and hire qualified and dynamic candidates.”
Do you have any idea how many assessments are actually job specific?
The assessments that companies most commonly use are personality and behavioral styles assessments and as such, are not job specific. Cue Objective Management Group (OMG). Its assessments are not only specific to sales but also role specific, as in outside roles like account executive, account manager, and channel manager, and account manager.
21 Sales Core Competencies assessed
OMG’s sales assessments measure candidates against 21 Sales Core Competencies (and several additional sales competencies) and compares candidates to the more than 2.2 million other sales candidates that OMG has assessed. This measurement standard is “normative” while personality and behavioral styles assessments tend to be “ipsative.” Ipsative scores provide a comparison within an individual and are NOT recommended to be used for recruitment and selection purposes because they don’t make a comparison between individuals.
Each OMG Sales Core Competency has an average of 8 attributes for a total of approximately 200 sales specific findings, customized to the specific role for which the candidate is being considered. OMG adjusts the requirements for a positive recommendation based on the difficulty of a specific sales job and role. Various industries, businesses, sales roles, complexities, sales cycles, price points, territories, markets, audiences and decision makers are not remotely similar so a sales assessment is only useful if those factors are considered in the scoring criteria and subsequent recommendation.
Identify a strong candidate
As an example, let’s say you were seeking to hire a ditch digger. While you must identify someone who is strong, can use tools and dig holes, the width and depth of the hole, as well as the difficulty of the digging is more important. Will this individual dig in sand, screened loom, compacted soil, clay, gravel, or rock? If an assessment, even one that was specific to ditch-digging, only looked at the tools they had available and their ability to dig in general, it would not necessarily identify someone who could dig monumentally huge holes in soil with large rocks.
It’s the same with a sales assessment. A sales assessment that scored a territory salesperson who takes orders from plant managers for industrial supplies equally with a salesperson who sells multi-million dollar capital equipment to the C Suite of the Fortune 500 enterprises, is of limited value. When the assessment can be configured to specify the requirements for those two sales roles and distinguish between the candidates applying for those two sales roles, we have perfection.
Let’s return to part of the the quote at the beginning of this article where Linda writes, “Getting beyond the interview and into the heart and soul of your candidates can give you a truer gauge of can they do the job and thrive as a member of your team.”
You do need a gauge, but the gauge should not be if they can do the job, but whether they will do the job. OMG effectively distinguishes between can sell (you’ve met those ghosts – candidates you hired who are no longer with you but they still haunt you!) versus will sell (they are your top performers). The other part of that quote which needs to be modified is where she says “getting beyond the interview.” You shouldn’t be wasting time interviewing those candidates who can sell when you can focus only on those candidates who will sell in the specific role for which they are being considered. Use the assessment early in the sales recruiting process to identify and disqualify the candidates that are not recommended.
OMG’s sales, sales management and sales leadership candidate assessments are legendary for how accurate and predictive they are.
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Posted by Dave Kurlan