I have read numerous article over the past few weeks about phone interviewing or screening sales candidates and every one of them miss the mark. Instead of going at what is wrong with each of these articles, I will give you some essentials that make this an effective step in our hiring process. These are the steps we incorporate into each recruitment process we run for our clients. These techniques have been developed through conducting thousands of sales interviews and phone screens over the past few years.
- What are the main requirements of the job? I am not talking about the job description. Instead, think about a wish list, so to speak, of what you need this person to be good at to close business for you. Do they need to be good on the phone? Do they need to be solutions-based in their approach rather than product based? Is this a business development role or an account management position? Chances are you are not going to find all of these skills in one person so pick the top 2-3 things from this wish list you know they must possess.
- Formulate questions to measure the candidates’ competency in these 2 or 3 requirements. Here is where a number of these articles fell down. Don’t ask simple questions like: How many accounts do you presently manage or how many times have you exceeded quota? You may be thinking that these are important to the job requirements and they may be – to a point. Let’s say this is an account manager position and you have been hit extremely hard by the competition in this territory. So these 2 questions do have some relevancy, but there are more pertinent questions to ask. More than likely their resume will reveal which years they exceeded quotas. If they have exceeded quota 2 of the last 4 years, which years did they meet it and, more importantly, why did they not meet it the other 2 years. So drill down – ask them why they did not meet quota. Looking back, what, if anything, could they have done differently? That will help you understand their ability to retain accounts.
- Use multiple filters throughout your hiring process. Think about the responses you need to hear in order for them to move on to the next filter. After you are done with each candidate’s phone screen answer this question – Were they strong enough to make it to the next step? Don’t get caught up in questioning an earlier decision. Don’t feel the need to compare candidates on a point-by-point basis. The only thing you should be doing is making a determination if this candidate will be making it to the next step.
- The last phone screen essential is to know (ahead of time) what the next step is in your process. I would recommend that you objectively assess each candidate before moving to the face-to-face interview. A simple reason – even bad salespeople can be adept at building rapport. In fact, they can be so good that an experienced hiring manager can get drawn in by their persona. I submit to you these 2 posts (Salespeople Are Professional Actors and The Unsaid Often Says It All) to illustrate why we assess all candidates before the in-person interview.