Page 16 - NBIZ December 2023

Key Objective

Metrics

Making the Best

to Hiring Decisions &

Avoiding Costly

Hiring Mistakes

By Michelle Caspole

ith gratitude, my company Another department we ran the names through
celebrated our 25th year in was accounts receivable as bottom performers usually
business and are still going show up there in the form of excessive credits, late
strong! Our core focus is payments, and returned goods due to poor sales rep-
helping executives avoid costly resentatives. Once we had those names, and we tested
Whiring mistakes at the point them using the PXT Select, we could begin to see deltas
of selection. As a former VP of Sales at small division of that would help identify traits essential to success and
DuPont, and later Revlon, I found myself constantly rely- traits that appear to be barriers to success. Here is an
ing on gut feel to hire B2B salespeople, sales managers, example of what we found. (See top right visual on
and other key revenue driving roles. Often, I was under following page)
pressure to fill the territory and “the following the gut Thinking Style represents their ability to solve
method” worked less than 50% of the time for me. problems, speed to learn, cognitive agility, and more. It’s
As with many sales managers, I found myself spend- a constant and does not change much over time. In this
ing over half my time trying to make underachieving chart, the green numbers represent the distribution of
sales people get to average at the cost of working with the top performers and red represents distribution of
my best people. I hung on to the low performers for far bottom performers.
too long and it impacted my effectiveness as a leader. It’s a small company with less than 15 sales people
If you have this same challenge in sales or other key so we layered their data on our national benchmark in
departments in your company, here is how to cut those that job category. The assessment is normed so 8-10
mistakes in half. represents the upper 16% of the population, 4-7 is middle
After studying the cognitive behaviors and motiva- 68% and 1-3 is the lower 16%.
tional interests of both our top and bottom performers in Here we quickly see that the job requires higher
job categories, as a company we were able to note what scores in thinking style. Simply put, one can see that if
were the differences between the groups. We looked for the scores fall below the shaded blue zone (benchmark),
clusters of scores in the top and outliers in the bottom the employee or potential candidate is underqualified
group. It was critical to have agreement on who were top and no amount of training will likely compensate for
and who were bottom. Often, CEOs are aware of this, but that. In this case, the numeric reasoning delta is very
sales managers sometimes have a hard time with it as big and that is almost impossible to detect in the normal
they are too close to the problem and friendly to all. interview. One must test for this.

16 NBIZ ■ December 2023