So you need more salespeople. Have you ever found hiring a salesperson and hiring your next TOP PERFORMER are two very different things? What if you could use science to help you find your next winner?

Hiring people takes loads of time. When you leverage two critical elements to hiring the right candidate you will not only speed up your process but also waste no time on those who don’t fit.

Hiring ScoreElement One: Fit

Fit is the most critical aspect of hiring the right candidate. By ensuring you’re interviewing someone who best fits with your management, the job, other employees, and your company, you are likely to obtain and retain the very best talent for the job at hand. Without a good fit, you put your entire organization’s culture in jeopardy.

Everyone is better served with a clear insight into how well the candidate fits the job, team, leadership, and company. The company wins, the manager wins, and, most importantly, the employee is better off as well. When you find a good fit you have a happier, healthier, and wealthier workplace.

This is the first ingredient in your recipe for retention and results.

Element Two: Traits

The science of recruitment is based on hiring candidates with the most desirable traits. The five most desirable traits include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability, and openness. This modern approach includes 20 additional traits that are overlapped over the four areas of fit to help you identify ideal candidates but also keep them once you’ve hired them.

The following questions help you breakdown where each of the 25 desirable traits belong in relation to fit:

How is this person likely to approach their work?

  • Conscientiousness
  • Acumen
  • Assurance
  • Resolve
  • Reliability

How is this person likely to interact with others?

  • Agreeableness
  • Gregariousness
  • Cooperativeness
  • Tact
  • Influence
  • Compassion

How is this person likely to embrace change?

  • Openness
  • Creativity
  • Adventurousness
  • Teamwork

How is this person likely to weather challenges and adversity?

  • Stability
  • Compliance
  • Optimism
  • Happiness

How is this person likely to behave as an individual?

  • Extraversion/Introversion
  • Intensity
  • Control
  • Decisiveness
  • Autonomy
  • Ambition

To make better choices, you need to measure what matters. By collecting better information about the things that matter most you can better predict success. Your main goal in selecting any new candidate is three-fold:

CAN this person do the job? Do they have the skills, education, and availability to succeed? You can collect these answers before you begin on the online application form. If there are areas that don’t meet your minimum standards or non-negotiables, you can skip to the next candidate.

HOW will this person do the job? Based on the individual’s personal traits and characteristics, is this candidate a good fit for this particular job? You would never hire a low learner to be an outside sales rep, just as you would never hire a high learner to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day. They would simply burn out and fail.

WILL this person do the job, and WHY? What standards, attitudes, values does your candidate live by? Are they in line with your company’s values? Are the company’s values being represented by the managers that are meant to support them? Selecting employees that are a good fit with your environment will help you protect your culture and nurture longterm, top performing employees.

About the Author: Ryan Chute, Wizard of Sales®, helps companies fix and build successful Selling Systems®. Generic sales training, new management, and fancy CRM’s are destined to fail in a broken system. Ryan Chute can help you uncover your bottlenecks, breakpoints, and blind spots to allow your business to flourish by analyzing The 6 Key Factors™ affecting your Selling System™ today.

Latest posts by Ryan Chute (see all)