A good online sales profiling tool will actually provide you with a recommendation as to whether or not you should or should not hire a particular candidate and how well they are aligned with the requirements of a specific job.

Often times the most troubling aspect of a search is being hot on a candidate and believing he or she is a good fit for a specific job assignment, only to have those hopes dashed by a non-hire recommendation coming back from your profiling tool. In those circumstances what do you do? Well, the real issue is that such a tool should not be used as the only set of information on which to base a hire/no hire decision. When we get back a no hire recommendation from our sales profiling tool, often times we still may make an offer to the candidate, but we’ll do so after following up with the candidate and using the areas of concern that uncovered in by the tool as a cue for asking more probing questions, and uncovering more information.

An online sales test is not a panacea for making an effective hiring decision. What it does do is provide you with another perspective as you go through the interviewing and hiring process. Why is this important? Well, all of us as interviewers, despite our best efforts, have blind spots when it comes to things that we miss through the interviewing process. In addition we often bond with a candidate as we go through multiple interviews, and start wishing and hoping that the candidate can and will be successful for a particular job. The more we like a candidate, the more we become oblivious to the potential weaknesses or pitfalls of that candidate’s sales profile relative to the position that we’re hiring for. This is why an online sales test or online sales profiling tool is so effective. It allows us to uncover other information that we may have missed through the interviewing process. and it allows us to circle back around with the candidate to probe more deeply and to confront them with some of the weaknesses that we’ve uncovered.

As a result of our experience we’ve used a variety of different online tests, but the one that we like the most is the Express Screen from Objective Management. www.objectivemanagement.com/expressscreens

This particular tool focuses on telling us whether or not a candidate can and will sell, what are some of their attitudes and beliefs that could potentially get in the way of their ability to be successful in a specific sales role, and it provides an exhaustive matching of each candidate’s exact sales experience with the position that we’re hiring for. It also allows you to understand, what is the growth potential of the candidate? Are they trainable? Do they have any significant chinks in their armor, which would lead you away from making an offer to them?

For all of the reasons I mentioned above, no one should view an online testing tool as the only way to a clear hiring decision on sales candidates, but it certainly does add value as a part of your overall sales interviewing process. When it’s integrated properly into the other aspects of your recruiting process, it can help you to reduce the number of mis-hires and improve your overall hiring effectiveness.