Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

Want to kill a great sales candidate? Give him or her a personality test!

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Today's post may alarm you, but hang in there, as what I'm discussing today could one day --- if it goes far enough --- affect everyone reading this post, individual sale reps as well as sales managers. The story I'm going to tell is right out of Monty Python, but it happened just last week to a great candidate that wants to be in inside sales, and has all the tools to be making six figures within a very short time. Here's a little background. Read along and see if you're as concerned for hiring practices our industry as I am:

Two weeks ago, I recommended a great candidate for an inside sales lead development position to a company whose inside sales manager I know and like. This candidate had sterling references from execs in the hospitality industry, and a history for getting repeat business out of customers that could be difficult. He's great on the phone, and he'll be a successful inside sales rep making six figures pretty soon. As an inside sales trainer for 20 years, I've got a good track record for finding talented people out of our industry and bringing them in to be successful sales reps, so this was going to be another winner (and I've had a bunch).

So I called my friend, an inside sales manager who is trying to  hire a rep for a company he's just started working with, told him about the candidate, and he was enthused. He said the candidate had to talk to HR first, and the HR specialist loved my candidate after talking with him. Then the HR specialist told the candidate that he'd have to take an online personality test (they called it a "sales aptitude test." And he "failed." The test claimed he couldn't deal with challenging people (I've known the candidate for some time, and this is 180 degrees wrong.)

My pal the Telesales manager wasn't allowed to talk to the candidate, as he'd been vetted out. So the manager's opinion on the candidate was worthless, as was the HR specialist's. The opinions of all personnel in the company responsible for hiring were overridden by a testing company, obviously hired by upper-level management. Incidentally, the position was for high tech inside sales in the Silicon Valley. The testing company was located thousands of miles away, and their website indicates they specialize in testing people for a number of industries, none of them high tech.

I believe this process is potentially dangerous to our high tech telesales industry, for the following reasons:

1) If personality tests had any merit at all, we'd be giving them to elementary school kids as predictors of who's going to end up being a career criminal. Then we'd provide remedial education. Then we'd have no more violent criminals. But we know such tests aren't adequate predictors, probably to the chagrin of the multimillion dollar test industry, who wishes they could prove them effective.

2) The Inside Sales manager asked for the test to be re-evaluated, so The World's Greatest Psychologists reinterpreted his answers. Politically as well as professionally, they can't change a result, can they? If they did, it would indicate the test wasn't valid to begin with.

3) A question that most be the most disconcerting: what kind of database is storing the "failed" questionnaire of the candidate? Who has access to it? Will it be used whenever another client of the testing company has the same candidate targeting a sales position within the new company? If so, the candidate will be discarded because there will already be a personality test on record. This "test" will probably be alive in a database in perpetuity.  I'm sure the testing company would deny it keeps old tests. Is that really believable?

4) If a company adopts this "personality testing" concept, why not just do away with my HR department altogether?  Why would a company need HR, when their judgment is valued so little that they can't override a personnel decision made by an outsourced company using computerized test made my supposed psychological sales "experts"? Why not just vet the candidate using a personality test, then let the Legal department handle pre and post-hiring issues?

Bottom line, the candidate loses, the company loses a good candidate, and because their opinions are worthless, the Inside Sales Manager and the HR specialist lose, too.

So I'm recommending that none of you reading this post EVER take a personality test. You might "lose," so you won't get the job, and your failed test will sit in a testing company's database, ticking away like a time bomb where it can be accessed by another potential company that may be thinking of hiring you. And you may never even know this occurred, because it will be hidden from you.

You can't test adults for what it takes to be successful inside sales reps. There are simply too many important variables, and they all change radically depending on the sales situation (one example: price negotiation techniques). Desire and intrinsic motivation can't be tested for. But a good inside sales manager can figure them out pretty quickly and have a real discussion with a candidate, using his or her expertise and experience within the industry, and candidate references (read my post 20 Characteristics of a Superior Inside Salesperson if you'd like to know what I'd look for in the interview process).

So if you're a sales exec or inside sales manager, challenge anyone in your company that tries to convince you that personality tests are meaningful predictors of sales success, because you'll be acing yourself out of being able to bring in good candidates that you know will be successful, based on your expertise and telesales savvy. And if you're a rep, avoid companies that insist you take a test as part of the hiring process: you don't want your name sitting in a database somewhere, describing your "personality." And add skepticism of the "personality testing" industry to your Best Practices playbook.