"Wrong Hires" in Sales– an undesirable phenomenon for hiring managers worldwide
When hiring salespeople, every employer wants to make the right decision and hire the most suitable candidate for a specific role in their sales team. Often, however, there are certain characteristics of a sales candidate that aren’t easily spotted during the recruitment phase. Examples are Mental Fitness, Motivational Drives and development potential. This results in employers making decisions that later prove to be a mistake or as it is often called a “Wrong Hire”.
To validate this hypothesis, we conducted a research survey among our 40 partners and over 1000 users globally. The results of this survey show us that 67% of the respondents have experienced a “Wrong Hire” in Sales.
This is a staggering number of wrong hires if we would extrapolate this to the total number of hiring decisions a commercial manager has fulfilled during his or her professional career.
Moreover, wrong hires are considered very costly to a company in several ways. Example of associated costs of “Wrong Hires” are: opportunity losses, direct and indirect costs.
To begin, we have 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘴. These are the costs incurred during the recruitment process, and they involve, for example, hiring an external or internal recruiter, scheduling and conduct the interview etc. What these costs also include is the training you provide the newly hired with. Therefore, direct costs of a bad hire, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, are at least 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.
However, much more significant are the “hidden” 𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘴 involved in wrong hires. An example for such costs is decreased productivity not only of the wrong hire, but also of the whole team since working in a team is based on interdependency and the actions of a single employee affects the results of the team as a whole. This leads to further delays in the business and therefore, potential loss of clients. Furthermore, a wrong hire may damage the company’s reputation by not delivering the service level and the customer experience that a customer expects of the company.
Furthermore, there are 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 associated with hiring the wrong person. One of them is the time allocated for onboarding and training of a wrong hire. This time is considered a loss due to the fact that it could be utilized in a different, more productive way – namely, by being devoted to people that deserve the coaching and attention. Another example is the loss of potential customers. Similar to retaining the existing customers, wrong hires frequently miss the opportunity to acquire new customers for the company due to their lack of motivation and decreased productivity.
All things considered, the overall costs of a “Wrong Hire” can go 𝗴𝗼 𝗮𝘀 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵 𝗮𝘀 $𝟭𝟬𝟬.𝟬𝟬𝟬.
Given the all these significant costs and the results of our survey, we can conclude that “Wrong Hires” are a very common problem that costs firms not only a tremendous amount of money, but it also harms the image of the firm and hinders its development.
The good news – we now have an excellent solution!
SalesStep-Select - the sales candidate assessment
SalesStep-Select is a shorter version of the successful SalesStep online sales assessment.
It is specifically catered for selecting Salespeople, effective recruitment and uncovering the actual state of their Sales Mindset. It takes only about 15 minutes to fill in and measures 15 sales competencies and will cost you only 50 euros. Therefore, it’s the perfect tool for avoiding wrong hires! With SalesStep-Select we are committed and convinced that your Wrong-Hire rate drops with the staggering 80%!
