

Show HN: Solving the problem of hiring salespeople - baudehlo
http://www.idealcandidate.com/for-employers/

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shubb
I can see the merits of this, but (scanning the front page) it looks like the
primary tool for selecting candidates is a psychometric assessment.

First of all this is only data driven if we can show that candidates who score
well are actually good sales people.

It is true that people with certain big four profiles for instance, tend to
end up in sales. But are they more likely to be good salesmen? People with low
intelligence or impulse inhibition tend to end up in prison, but are they
effective criminals?

This is an exciting first step - by gathering quantitative data about the
roles that the candidates go into, and how they perform, you could build the
model you need. You probably don't have it yet though.

The other important thing is that different types of sales require very
different people.

Sometimes, sales people need to penetrate a market where contacts are
important, and deals are huge but take a long time to set up. They need to be
the kind of person who can foster long term relationships, and maintain long
term personal relationships with people and organizations.

Other times, deals are small, or relatively small, and what is important is
volume. Maybe they need to rapidly create a shallow relationship, close the
sale, and walk away. Maybe they need to cold call, and be especially tenacious
in the face of rejection.

I'd be fascinated to see you create a questionnaire or similar that identifies
the right person for that specific role.

What about administrating the tests to current employees, along with details
from their bosses about performance. That way you could build a model of the
kind of person who does well at that organization, at least generically.

~~~
baudehlo
The important thing about the way we calculate things here is that there isn't
a "scoring well". You might max out the scores on certain groups of answers
and it won't get you the job because we're comparing candidates to the top
performers, who likely won't max out those profiles - having a more balanced
personality could be far more important.

We have done some work pulling in Salesforce data directly so we can assess
results - a feedback loop of sorts - once a candidate is hired we directly see
the results of their performance. We aren't far enough along to publish
results of that feedback loop though because all sales roles take a while
ramping up.

    
    
      What about administrating the tests to current employees, along with details from their bosses about performance. That way you could build a model of the kind of person who does well at that organization, at least generically.
    

That's exactly what this does.

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notahacker
Even though I find psychometric test questions pretty cringeworthy in general,
I do see the value of this service (anecdata on them actually working in a big
corp environment: psychometric testing was part of a screening process which
ultimately lead to me being offered a sales role I stayed at for 3 years and
was rehired for after a career break, as opposed to the more junior one
actually advertised, whose working conditions I certainly wouldn't have
tolerated for more than a week). It's also slickly put together.

The negatives: I first questioned the value of the service when it limited the
industries I could be interested in to five, especially before the evaluation
process. A huge proportion of sales jobs hire more on personality match than
anything else, and the overlapping categories ("accounting" is pretty strictly
a subset of "professional services", and "advertising" of "media") don't help.

Even by the standards of psychometric tests the personality questions are
repetitive. I certainly wouldn't have completed it without evidence there were
interesting jobs the other side if it wasn't posted here; by the tenth
question about whether I found it easy to read others' emotions I think even a
really bad human recruiter would have taken the hint. Even accounting for the
need to rephrase questions to check for consistency and some of those
questions on basic empathy selecting for reliance on visual cues, there were
too many. There aren't many salespeople who are going to honestly acknowledge
an actual weakness in social skills in a system designed to rank their sales
ability anyway (and similarly even serial liars like to create the impression
they're generally truthful...except perhaps when asked about the lengths
they'll go to for a sale).

On the other hand the sales questions, which seemed to be fewer in number and
much better, seemed to miss some of the absolute classics in understanding
salespeople's approaches like "salespeople should always be closing", "I'm
best when focused on reaching as many new customers as possible",
"understanding the customer is mostly about social skills".

For that matter, I'm still trying to work out why the eventual output scored
me lowest for "analytical skills" (there's a joke in there somewhere...) but I
think that reflects the balance of questions asked more than my actual
relative weaknesses.

I actually think the idea has a lot of potential: there are vast differences
in sales environments, often very poorly communicated by the actual ads, and
usually vast numbers of salespeople with similarly disparate skillsets and
homogenous CVs. But the questions could use some work.

Unrelated whinges: I don't particularly like or trust LinkedIn social signup
even though I can understand why you'd use it (and contrary to popular belief
there are good salespeople that don't use LinkedIn). I particularly don't like
giving LinkedIn details to you and then having to create an imaginary North
American address and zip code to continue the process, even though
theoretically I could be willing to relocate a lot further than 150 miles, and
many sales positions are remote...

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baudehlo
I've been working on this for the last year now. The basic problem is that as
a developer you have lots of ways to evaluate a candidate (coding tests). With
hiring for Sales it's not that easy - the traditional way is to rely on an
interview in which you go on gut instinct.

We're trying to change that by applying some science to the problem. The key
idea is to find you sales people who match your current top performers'
profiles using an assessment that is geared towards the sales process.

The system is built in Node.js, Angular and PostgreSQL, and uses some of the
machine learning concepts I contributed to SpamAssassin.

~~~
mbesto
Interesting concept. Why not change your tagline to "coding interviews for
sales people" and specifically target the tech community. It also wasn't clear
about "what's different".

IMO this is a huge problem in startup tech right now - having good sales
abilities and also hiring people who do.

~~~
baudehlo
We're targeting tech companies right now purely because they tend to "get"
this much better than other industries, but ultimately it's a much bigger
market than just tech.

I'll pass on the feedback about the lack of "what's different" to the guy
doing the site - it seems to be a bit of a pattern.

