Personality Tests, Sales Candidate Selection – How Tests Measure Up

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated keynote speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and expert on all things sales and selling.

A recent article in Columbus Business First discussed background checks and use of personality tests.  The most important line in the article read, “Personality often is the best insight into whether a person is a good cultural fit for a specific company.”

Notice that they didn’t say that personality is the best insight into whether a person will succeed in sales.  That’s because it isn’t.  Never was.  Never will be.

Despite that, article after article point to the advantage of personality tests as a sales pre-employment tool.  And most personality assessments now claim to be able to help you eliminate sales hiring mistakes, too.  The reality though is that almost every available “sales assessment” is a marketing-modified version of a personality assessment.  By marketing-modified, I mean that the actual findings are the exact same findings you will see on their standard personality test, but the names or labels of the findings have been modified to sound as if they are sales findings.  As with costumes, you only need to take off the mask and you’ll see what’s underneath.  No exceptions.  No apologies.

Personality tests aren’t predictive either.  Oh, they say that they are?  Then why is their validation of choice “construct validity” rather than “predictive validity”?

There is only one original, sales-specific assessment that collects, measures, and provides true sales findings and its predictive validity is incomparable. Objective Management Group (OMG) has been perfecting sales selection for 23 years and you can’t beat these two statistics:

• 75% of Candidates, who are not recommended but get hired anyway, fail within six months.
• 92% of Candidates, who are recommended and hired, rise to the top half of their sales forces within 12 months.

Are you using the right assessment?

The right assessment is only part of the solution to developing consistency with your sales hiring and selection.  You also need a best-practices, sales recruiting process.  You can see how your existing process rates by using our free tool, the Sales Recruiting Process Grader.

And of course, sales management plays a part in your hiring process too.  They’re responsible for on-boarding, messaging, coaching, accountability, direction, guidance, and support.  If they don’t perform any one or more of those functions effectively, even a strong salesperson can fail.

Finally, no process is stronger than its weakest link.  In the sales recruiting process, that weakness could be your job posting.  Most companies get that part completely wrong, attracting the wrong salespeople into the candidate pool and if you don’t have the right candidates in the pool, the process, assessment and sales management become non-factors.

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