Sales Selection Tools: Do You Get What You Pay For?

Perhaps you’ve heard the advertisement while listening to a SiriusXM radio station.  It’s for Home Title Lock.  They scare you by mentioning that some bad people can commit fraud by going online, claiming your home’s title, taking ownership of your home, and borrowing against your home’s equity without you knowing it.  Home Title Lock prevents this from happening.  Maybe.  I don’t know enough to say whether this fraud actually happens and whether their service works.  But I do know this.  I’ve been trying to cancel my business internet with Verizon for two months and I can’t prove to them that it’s my account.  If the legitimate account holder, with credentials (account numbers, invoices, names and address), is unable to cancel my own business internet account, how can someone casually take over your title and suddenly own your home?  It doesn’t make sense to me!

Here’s another thing that doesn’t make sense.

If you have used Indeed to hire salespeople, they will offer to have your candidates take a free sales assessment.  Doesn’t that sound great?  It is great if the assessment is helpful but it happens to be a useless piece of crap.  Why would anyone think, for even a moment, that there is any value in their lame, assessment-in-name-only test?

In this article we’ll explore how Indeed’s sales assessment compares to the gold standard in sales candidate assessments from Objective Management Group (OMG).

Indeed offers several conclusions about each candidate:

• Expert
• Highly Proficient
• Proficient
• Familiar
• Completed

By comparison, OMG offers three recommendations:

• Recommended
• Worthy of Consideration
• Not Recommended

Indeed measures what candidates know about selling but doesn’t tell us what it is that they actually know!  Indeed measures their general knowledge of selling.

This statement by Indeed is very telling:  “Indeed makes no statement as to the skill level of a candidate.”

So they administer a sales skills assessment, provide one of five scoring ranges, but don’t back it up:

OMG measures a candidate’s capabilities in 21 Sales Core Competencies, each consisting of 6-12 attributes, and then calculates whether they have the necessary attributes and competencies required to succeed in the selling role for which they are being considered, in that company’s marketplace(s), against their competition, at their price point and with the challenges which their company and salespeople face. OMG factors in the difficulty of the sales role and measures how closely the candidate’s capabilities fit that sales role. This is OMG’s dashboard, which is followed by around twenty pages of scoring and details about the attributes from each competency.  You might notice that under the recommendation, this company used OMG’s multi-role assessment where candidates are  evaluated for fit to multiple selling roles at the company.  This candidate was recommended for an Account Executive role and a Specialty role, but only worthy of consideration for a Senior Account Executive role which is more difficult than the other two roles:

Do you see the subtle difference between the two assessments?  You get what you pay for which, in Indeed’s case, is nothing.

If you aren’t using the Gold Standard in sales candidate assessments, why are you attempting to outsmart the world’s most accurate and predictive sales selection tool?

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