Most companies that come to us don’t have a candidate problem. They have a process problem.
They’ve hired the wrong people, yes. But the reason they keep hiring the wrong people isn’t bad luck or a thin talent pool. It’s that they’re using a hiring process designed to evaluate accountants to evaluate salespeople. The process produces random results because it’s not built to identify the specific characteristics that predict sales performance.
Here’s what’s actually going wrong.
When you sit across from a salesperson in an interview, you are not evaluating their sales ability. You’re evaluating their interview ability. And salespeople — good ones and bad ones alike — are trained to perform in exactly this kind of setting.
They’ve rehearsed answers to your questions. They know how to build rapport quickly. They know how to handle objections, including your skepticism. They can project confidence, competence, and enthusiasm on command. The best interviewees are often the worst hires. The correlation between interview performance and sales performance is almost zero.
Most companies post a job description, start receiving applications, and begin evaluating candidates — without ever writing down what a successful hire looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days.
Without that benchmark, you’re not comparing candidates to a standard. You’re comparing them to each other — and to your gut feeling in the moment. This is how likable people beat qualified people, every time.
“Strong communicator.” “Self-motivated.” “Results-driven.” These phrases appear in 90% of sales job descriptions. They’re also completely unmeasurable in an interview. What you actually need to screen for: coachability, resilience to rejection, pattern recognition in complex conversations, and intrinsic motivation tied to achievement rather than comfort. None of these show up reliably in a traditional interview.
When hiring has no structure — different interviewers asking different questions, no scoring rubric, no defined stages — you’re not running a process. You’re having a series of conversations and then making a group decision based on whoever felt best about whoever they happened to talk to. That is not a system. It produces random results.
The most common shortcut in sales hiring is requiring previous sales experience. The logic seems sound: if they’ve sold before, they can sell again. The data does not support this. Sales experience in a different environment, with different products, to different buyers, is only loosely predictive of performance in your environment. The skills that made someone a top performer at a SaaS company don’t automatically transfer to B2B services, manufacturing, or financial products.
A process that produces consistent results does five things: it defines the role before posting (compensation, success metrics, sales environment); uses structured screening to filter early without relying on resumes alone; applies validated assessment tools before first-round interviews; runs structured interviews with a fixed question set and scoring rubric; and makes offers based on data rather than consensus gut feeling.
When each of those components is in place, the hit rate changes. Not because the candidates got better — because the process got smarter.
Want to see how this applies to your specific hiring situation? Download the Sales Hiring Blueprint or book a call at advancedhiring.com/lets-talk/
