Competency-based hiring and analytics pay off

High performing teams focus more on competency-based hiring and analytics and performance forecasting when compared to low-performing managers, according to a report titled “Demystifying Sales Hiring”. The report has been published by Mettl (a global online talent measurement solution provider) in collaboration with SHRM India. The key objective of the research study is to better understand the nature of sales across industries as well as identify key factors that lead to success in various sales situations. It provides insights regarding “how HRs can build a winning sales team”. The survey covered 1,600-plus sales professionals across industries.

Hiring the right talent emerged as one of the top three growth drivers to improve the performance of sales across industry, company size, buyer type business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). Teams invest inadequate time to know why their top performers are successful in their organisation. Further, many firms don’t use simple tools like online assessments and structured interviews for hiring the right sales executive effectively. An important block in ensuring organisations grow at the desired rates and sell to the new-age customers is by building winning sales team. HRs and sales leaders need to understand which competencies make their top performers successful. These competencies then must be replicated to resolve multiple issues faced by HRs across employee life cycle ranging from shortlisting the right people out of the shrinking talent pool to hiring the best-fit candidate for organisation’s unique requirements to on-boarding these right people quickly to keeping them motivated and ensuring regular trainings for better productivity as well as returns on investments.