Should you use personality tests to evaluate your salespeople?

As the resident recruiter at OpenView Labs, the most important part of my job is providing recruiting support to our portfolio companies. Since I do not have the capacity to help with every hire at each of our expansion stage companies, I focus on searches which are considered high impact initiatives and which are in line with the quarterly or annual goals of a company. With these facts considered, it has been no surprise to me that the positions I have recruited for the most so far have been in sales. We all know that good salespeople are essential for business success, but unless you’ve recruited them before, you may not know how difficult they are to hire.

Inc. Magazine published an article earlier this week which discusses just this issue. Since salespeople usually know how to sell themselves, it can be difficult to figure out aspects of their personality which may affect their sales success in an interview, such as whether they would become impatient with a slower sales cycle, or would be able to create the sense of urgency required for a shorter one.Making decisions about the probability of success between sales candidates can be even more difficult at a junior level, when a candidate has not had the opportunity to establish a successful track record. For this reason, personality tests are becoming more common among searches for sales candidates. There are several popular testing tools, which measure things like assertiveness and aggressiveness (Caliper Profile), prudence and interpersonal sensitivity (The Hogan Personality Inventory), and energy level (PDP ProScan).

So far, we have not utilized personality testing for the sales searches we have conducted, but I think they could be very helpful when evaluating candidates who will provide lead generation services for our portfolio companies.