Selecting the Right Talent to drive Sales Excellence

This Oil & Gas OEM and Services company was diversifying and needed to recruit several sales personnel while also raising the bar for the existing sales team in the face of increasing competition. Earlier, the brand attracted customers, and hence the sales team were more of order takers than solution specialists who created a demand for services and products. The influx of strong competitors coupled with the growth of local service centres demanded a significantly new approach to sales.

We were invited to intervene by the Human Resources head, based on our expertise in recruitment and executive search. The selection process followed by the business was a simple biographical interview process. The hiring managers were not trained in selection, and the business was not working with a competency framework. To recast the process, we designed a Competency Framework for the sales team and key hiring managers were trained on the framework to ensure a uniform understanding of the competencies. Assessment centres were designed to ensure candidates with experience in sales excellence were recruited. These included a personality profile, role based individual or group activities, and a structured competency-based interview and competency-based interview questionnaires were created to focus on sales roles. All hiring managers were trained on using the behavioural based tests as well as conducting and assessing the competency-based interviews. A scoring format allowed assessment scores from each activity in the assessment centre to be aggregated into a final candidate score which formed the basis for final recruitment decisions.

The business saw an improvement in the quality of hires, which in turn led to performance improvements. The hiring managers voiced a greater confidence level while making recruitment decisions and the professionalism demonstrated through the process left candidates with a positive feeling. There was a marked reduction in ‘hiring errors’ that brought confidence in the process as compared to the earlier state where employees were not being confirmed during or post the probationary period. This resulted in significant cost reduction within the business, and also turned around the reputation the Group had as a revolving door for individuals in the sales team.