Sales roles vary considerable based on what the companies sell and who they sell it to. Some organisations require a consultative sales approach, others are more focused on closing deals. Some deals are high value others sell low value goods. Some buyers are highly educated on a topic, others need educating. And contrary to popular belief, not all the best sales people are extroverts. As such, it’s impossible to create a sales assessment that is appropriate to all work environments.
Because of this, using bespoke sales assessments rather than a generic tool like a personality test is the best approach. For high applicant volumes a bespoke sales assessment will enable you to see which candidates to prioritise in the talent pool. For low applicant volumes, asking candidates to complete a fun and engaging realistic job assessment will empower you to assess whether they have the right skills and behaviours much more quickly.
Identifying which candidates to prioritise in the applicant pool for graduate roles and apprenticeships is a big problem. One of the main reasons for this is because most candidate lack relevant work experience.
Pre-hire assessments can be used instead of traditional resume reviews for early careers hiring to automatically screen candidates for job suitability. The right assessments can also communicate role realities to candidates. This encourages applicants that aren’t fully committed to opt-out of the recruitment process.
Most companies that use online assessments for graduate or non-graduate early careers roles use them at the start of the hiring process – just after the point of application. Interviewers can then use the insights generated on each candidate to make a more informed hiring decision at the assessment centre.
Graduate and Apprenticeships are all different. As such, generic skills or behavioural assessments don’t work effectively. What is required is a bespoke assessment that model the skills and competencies required to thrive on your graduate program or apprenticeship. These should be tailored for each apprenticeship level e.g. level 3 will be a different assessment than one for level 6 apprentices. This doesn’t mean the attributes you’d like to assess will be different, but the scoring or examples used to test those skills or behaviours will be level appropriate.
Often graduate-level pre-employment tests involve a combination of judgement based questions to measure high-level attributes such as problem solving and adaptability. They often also include skills-based questions to measure essential attributes such as attention to detail, written and verbal communication.
When recruiting for early careers its best to use assessments at the top of the recruitment funnel, automatically after job application to identify which candidates to prioritise in the applicant pool for faster, more effective hiring.
Identifying which candidates have the right behaviours and skills required to work in sales is difficult to do with resumes and CVs. That’s why a number of forward-thinking graduate recruiters are using pre-hire assessments to streamline their hiring processes.
ThriveMap is the #1 Realistic Job Assessments platform.
Combining the most predictive selection methods into one assessment, ThriveMap’s Realistic Job Assessments take candidates through the experience of a working day in the role in your company – giving you and them a better picture of suitability from the outset.
We’re different for the following reasons:
Each company is unique. In fact, each role within each company is unique. Someone could perform well in the same job in another company and fail in yours.
People behave differently in different contexts. Measuring someone’s ability in one environment does not mean they’ll display that ability in another.
Jobs are constantly evolving. Unlike other assessment providers, if something’s not working, you have the power to change it.
We place the candidate in the heart of the story of a typical work day. If they don’t like the sound of the role or culture they can withdraw from the process at any time.