The Real Costs Of Hiring The Wrong Salesperson

The financial cost of hiring and training the wrong person is obvious enough, but the damage a bad hire can do to the productivity and morale of your sales team can be far more subtle and costly. The following will explore the hidden costs of a bad hire and offer some methods for prevention.

A Hit To Team Morale:

Professional disengagement can be contagious. The longer an unmotivated salesperson stays on your team, the more people they will negatively influence with their lacklustre attitude. Motivating your team takes tremendous skill and effort. Breaking morale, however, does not. Any underperformer is well equipped to do it.

A Drain On Productivity:

Spending time training the wrong person and managing any potential personality conflicts between them and your existing personnel means that your management is wasting valuable resources. A bad hire will never be able to give your company a return on this labour investment, leaving you with the frustration over wasted time that could have been put towards improving your business.

Stained Reputation:

If your new hire is in a client-facing role, they have the potential to jeopardize valuable relationships with clients. Each member of your team is an ambassador of your company and brand, and an inept or unprofessional salesperson can spoil a client’s perception of your entire organization.

So, what are some ways of preventing a bad hire?

The most common mistake hiring managers make is misjudging a candidate’s personality type and work tendencies, because these qualities are considerably more challenging to assess than a candidate’s level of experience or education.

One method for accurately assessing a candidate’s key personality traits is sales personality testing. For decades, thousands of companies have used sales personality tests to evaluate a candidate’s suitability for a role in sales. The test provides a highly accurate assessment of a candidate’s soft skills and personality type, evaluating their strengths in the areas of sociability, patience, emotional control and motivation. Companies like Sales Test Online provide an economical and highly accurate sales personality test, which is an ideal tool for predicting a candidate’s aptitude for a role in sales.

In addition to adequate screening, it is important to take the time to create an effective multiple-step interviewing process. Rushing a decision will only cost you more time in the long run. A good plan of action for how to structure your interviewing process is outlined in this article from The Globe and Mail.

Finally, if you have already hired the wrong person, it is imperative that you act quickly to correct the mistake. Most companies wait too long to fire underperformers. Once it is evident that a new hire is unable or unwilling to meet the expectations you’ve outlined for their role, don’t wait too long to terminate. When the survival of your company is on the line, you simply do not have the time to allow for multiple second chances.

No company sets out to hire the wrong person, but as we all know, bad hiring happens in every organization. Taking the time to carefully creen candidates and interviewing them effectively is the surest way of creating and keeping the kind of team you need to make your company a success.

Have you read?

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