Building a Sales Hiring Process That Actually Works
Most companies don't have a sales hiring process. They have a series of interviews. Learn how to define the role, decide what evidence matters, give every interviewer a purpose, run better debriefs, and be ready to act when you find the right salesperson. Most companies don't really have a sales hiring process. Someone decides they need an AE, a job description gets posted, resumes start coming in, and three or four people interview each candidate. Everyone gets together afterward and talks about who they liked, who they didn't, and whether anyone feels strongly enough to move forward. Sometimes they hire someone. More often, especially with an important sales hire, the process just keeps going. They interview ten people, then twenty, then thirty. Three months later, they've talked to plenty of qualified candidates but still haven't hired anyone. Eventually, four months into the search, they make a hire because they need to fill the seat and one candidate feels like the safest option. The problem usually isn't that there weren't any good candidates. It's that the company never defined what evidence it needed to see to make a confident decision. Every interviewer was evaluating something slightly different, asking many of the same questions, and forming their own definition of what "good" looked like. That's a series of interviews. It isn't a hiring system. A real sales hiring process starts before the first candidate ever shows up. What exactly does this person need to accomplish? What kind of selling environment are they walking into? What evidence would convince us they've done something similar successfully? Who is responsible for testing each part? What would make us say no? And when we find the right person, how quickly are we prepared to move? If you don't answer those questions until candidates are already interviewing, you're building the process while you're trying to use it.
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