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Surveying 100+ PreSales leaders to find out their real beliefs
“In the first part of my career, I only thought about hiring when I had a vacancy; the second you get the offer out to a candidate, you wipe the sweat off your brow and you go back to your job. That’s the wrong mindset, hiring is job number one of a leader.”
— Malcolm Murphy, Vice President, Solution Engineering
This quote was taken from the launch video of a report we recently released around hiring in PreSales. I think it points to an uncomfortable truth: Your ability to make the right hires over time can make or break your PreSales team. Yet all too often, how we go about hiring is not given due consideration until the urgent need to fill a role is upon us.
This reactivity leads to more instances of rejected offers, needlessly protracted hiring processes, suboptimal hires, and the unwitting rejection of candidates who would otherwise have been stellar hires — resulting, ultimately, in less capable teams and poorer business outcomes.
To understand the current state of hiring in PreSales, we surveyed 103 PreSales leaders from around the world, asking 54 questions relating to:
- What candidate characteristics lead to high performance on the job.
- How these characteristics are measured in the hiring process.
- How the effectiveness of the interview process itself is measured and improved.
Of those surveyed, the split between first-level managers and second level or above was even, with an average team size of 27 per respondent. Participants were mainly based in EMEA and North America and predominantly worked at tier 1 or scale-up enterprise SaaS vendors.
Key Findings
We believe the results of the survey show the PreSales profession has the opportunity to professionalise further and get better hiring results.
- Only 50% of hiring teams initiate the hiring process with a clearly defined matrix of skills and competencies to measure. Only 46% have and share this with the hiring team.
- Only 33% of PreSales leaders are satisfied or very satisfied with the interview training they have received across their career.
- 22% of PreSales leaders haven’t received any interview training.
- 73% of PreSales organisations do not measure quality of hire.
- PreSales managers have a strong bias toward making hiring decisions based on the interviews they're involved in. At the same time, their decision leads with ‘gut feel,’ with 58% rating their use of intuition at 8/10 importance or higher.
Delving into the findings
Let’s look more specifically at how participants responded to survey questions.
What PreSales Leaders Look For
Our takeaway: Since “partnering effectively in account teams” topped the list of job components, it’s worth measuring effectively.
We were surprised to see “effective collaboration with account teams” (i.e., partnering effectively with AEs) to be the most important job component — we were expecting it to be around third. This highlights a slight difference between what managers say publicly and act on in reality.
For PreSales leaders: Have you thoughtfully considered how you can consistently and accurately measure this ability? From our perspective, the options are:
- Competency-based questions: These are OK but have limitations. One thing is knowing what to do; another is actually doing it. Recounting war stories may be rosier than the battle itself.
- References: From experience across hundreds of PreSales recruiting processes, I believe a reference from a trusted source who has worked closely with the candidate can provide useful insight.
- Job samples: As already happens with the demo stage, replicating a real-life scenario provides the opportunity to tangibly see how a candidate will operate in the heat of the moment. This is especially useful for AE/SC interactions, as critical moments tend to arrive in emotionally charged and pressured situations. We believe this approach is the most effective, but don’t yet have data to back this up.
- Psychometrics: Working effectively with sales execs requires emotional intelligence and the ability to set limits. Psychometric tests can provide additional context to build on in interviews but are not recommended as a stand-alone way to assess. As a shameless plug, at Bright Dynamics we have built the profession’s first PreSales-specific psychometric assessments, partnering with Sova Assessments.
From the perspective of individual contributors, there are ways in an interview to demonstrate your ability to partner with AEs:
- Go to the interview prepared with clear, concise examples of how you’ve partnered with AEs. PreSales managers want to see that you can tread the line between standing your ground and developing a partnership of equals through emotional intelligence and competency. Equally important to managers is the balance between resolving any conflict.
- Consider asking an AE or sales leader you’ve worked with to serve as a reference.
- Show by doing, or at least show by charming. AEs and sales heads may interview you, and getting their thumbs up helps greatly. Ask the sales leader questions like, “What have you seen the best SEs bring to the opportunities they work on?” then tailor your answers to those specific areas.
How Assessment Methods are Used and Rated
Our takeaway: We can make the interview process faster and more effective.
It’s notable that the best-rated assessment methods are those where hiring managers are directly involved, namely the hiring manager 1-2-1 and the panel stage interview. Conversely, those interviews carried out by a senior non-hiring manager — normally a sales head or PreSales VP — only receive a 19% high rating and those carried out by SC peers only a 21% high rating. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there!
This raises a question: If an interview process is already too long, leading to dropouts of eligible candidates and a slower time-to-hire, why are we including assessment methods like senior non-hiring manager interviews in the process? As Greg Holmes pointed out in our report launch video, these stakeholders can be incorporated into the panel stage, giving them the chance to participate in the process without slowing it down.
Interviewing as a Key Competency
Our takeaway: Just like demoing, interviewing is a skill that improves with training.
The results speak for themselves. The question is why is there so little training and what is the impact?
Perhaps interviewing is not close enough to a manager’s core skills for it to be on their radar (like demo or product training would be) or maybe accountability for interview training is not clear between PreSales organisations, HR, and talent acquisition, so nobody ends up owning it. Maybe the downside of limited training is not quantifiable, because quality of hire is not measured.
In terms of the impact, there is clearly a significant difference in business impact between a bad hire, good hire, and great hire. As Malcolm Murphy points out in our launch conversation, it’s not just the cost of bad hires, it’s the cost of would-have-been great hires that you passed on. Like demoing or discovery, while interviewing is something that capable individuals can figure out on their own, there will be inconsistencies and reduced capabilities across the organization without training.
Intuition and Decision Making
Our takeaway: Create an environment of “informed intuition.”
It’s apparent that PreSales hiring managers rely heavily on intuition, what’s more with a strong bias to their own intuition vs. others, as demonstrated previously where respondents rate their own interviews as most effective.
Most would agree that there is a balance to strike between listening to your gut and testing it against tangible proof points. As Greg and Malcolm outlined here:
In the report we have labeled this as “informed intuition,” with a structured hiring process as the best context for intuition to operate within. This would include:
- A clearly defined skills and competencies matrix, shared with the hiring team, assigning certain competencies as special focus areas to each interviewer. For example, if an AE interviews a candidate, they can focus on sales acumen.
- Use varied assessment methods to create as many data points as possible (without making the process longer). Try a combination or competency questions, achievement-based questions, job samples, and psychometrics.
- Six months into a hire’s tenure, go back to the interviewer ratings at the point of hire, review them on a competency-by-competency basis through quality of hire measurements to uncover intuition blind spots.
- Improve hiring manager interview skills through PreSales-specific training and support from PreSales hiring mentors (those who score best in quality of hire metrics). Video-based learning opens additional possibilities.
Our takeaway: Quality of hire management is mere guesswork — without the right metrics.
When it comes to hiring, how do you know how well you are doing?
Given the difference in outcomes between a bad hire and a superstar hire, most PreSales leaders would agree quality is paramount, yet 73% don’t measure quality in a structured manner.
Clearly, most managers have a general idea of which hires have worked well and which haven’t. This may be true directionally, but it lacks depth, and fails to reveal ways you can improve.
In the report we recommend this zero-cost, low-effort alternative.
- At the point of hire, request every interviewer rate the new hire with an overall score, as well as a score against every competency included in the interviewing scorecard (keep it at around five to maintain simplicity).
- At six months and 12 months, score the new hire again with on-the-job scorings across competencies, along with an overall rating.
- With this information, over time you can start to evaluate how well you are assessing with improved precision.
Once you have this data for multiple hires, you’ll begin to see which competencies your hiring process is effective at measuring (e.g., demos and presenting) and which areas it’s less effective at measuring (e.g., resilience and grit). From there you can tweak your interviewing process to alleviate blind spots.
What’s more, you’ll collect data on how effective different interviewers are. Where the data suggests interviewers are assessing poorly, you can train and develop (or in the case of sales leaders, have some welcome data). Where interviewers show a proven track record of consistently understanding candidate strengths and weakness, you can involve them more in improving the organisation’s overall hiring capability (e.g., creating hiring manager champions and mentors or involving them in assessment design).
Additionally, you can build a picture of which hiring sources — career page applicants, employee referrals, talent acquisition sourced, agency sourced — are most effective.
Summary
“Hiring is the most important thing I do. You hire the right people and the rest takes care of itself, if you hire the wrong people … the rest takes care of itself.”
— Dave Schultz, Global head of Solutions Consulting
We believe the survey shows us that hiring is important yet challenging. We believe the actions we’ve suggested will help:
- Increase speed and reduce complexity through consolidating secondary stakeholders like sales leaders into the panel stage.
- Increase structure without allowing interviewing to become too rigid or impersonal.
- Incorporate job samples beyond the demo, especially for AE/SC collaboration and discovery.
- Provide more PreSales-specific interview training and mentoring.
- Measure the quality of hire, use the data to continually improve assessment, increase hiring team accountability, and identify hiring champions and mentors.
- Create an environment of “informed intuition” through structure, training, and support.
Read the full report here: https://bit.ly/42PnkUI
Listen to our series of conversations with hiring managers and PreSales thought leaders here: https://www.brightdynamics.co.uk/hireside-chats/
Learn about our PreSales competency model here: https://www.brightdynamics.co.uk/presales-candidate-assessment/
About John Hodgson
John is the founder and director of Bright Dynamics, the PreSales profession’s first dedicated recruiting firm, Bright Dynamics works with companies like SAP, Adobe and Slack to build their PreSales teams globally.
When it comes to hiring, John has developed an approach tailored for PreSales that places quality-of-hire at the centre. This methodology is the culmination of 18 years’ experience front-line recruiting in tech alongside 100’s of PreSales-specific searches, cherry picking the best habits and techniques of the PreSales leaders he’s worked with.
John is based in the Sintra region of Portugal where you can find him out in nature, cooking up a barbecue or at the beach making sandcastles with his five-year-old.
Surveying 100+ PreSales leaders to find out their real beliefs
“In the first part of my career, I only thought about hiring when I had a vacancy; the second you get the offer out to a candidate, you wipe the sweat off your brow and you go back to your job. That’s the wrong mindset, hiring is job number one of a leader.”
— Malcolm Murphy, Vice President, Solution Engineering
This quote was taken from the launch video of a report we recently released around hiring in PreSales. I think it points to an uncomfortable truth: Your ability to make the right hires over time can make or break your PreSales team. Yet all too often, how we go about hiring is not given due consideration until the urgent need to fill a role is upon us.
This reactivity leads to more instances of rejected offers, needlessly protracted hiring processes, suboptimal hires, and the unwitting rejection of candidates who would otherwise have been stellar hires — resulting, ultimately, in less capable teams and poorer business outcomes.
To understand the current state of hiring in PreSales, we surveyed 103 PreSales leaders from around the world, asking 54 questions relating to:
- What candidate characteristics lead to high performance on the job.
- How these characteristics are measured in the hiring process.
- How the effectiveness of the interview process itself is measured and improved.
Of those surveyed, the split between first-level managers and second level or above was even, with an average team size of 27 per respondent. Participants were mainly based in EMEA and North America and predominantly worked at tier 1 or scale-up enterprise SaaS vendors.
Key Findings
We believe the results of the survey show the PreSales profession has the opportunity to professionalise further and get better hiring results.
- Only 50% of hiring teams initiate the hiring process with a clearly defined matrix of skills and competencies to measure. Only 46% have and share this with the hiring team.
- Only 33% of PreSales leaders are satisfied or very satisfied with the interview training they have received across their career.
- 22% of PreSales leaders haven’t received any interview training.
- 73% of PreSales organisations do not measure quality of hire.
- PreSales managers have a strong bias toward making hiring decisions based on the interviews they're involved in. At the same time, their decision leads with ‘gut feel,’ with 58% rating their use of intuition at 8/10 importance or higher.
Delving into the findings
Let’s look more specifically at how participants responded to survey questions.
What PreSales Leaders Look For
Our takeaway: Since “partnering effectively in account teams” topped the list of job components, it’s worth measuring effectively.
We were surprised to see “effective collaboration with account teams” (i.e., partnering effectively with AEs) to be the most important job component — we were expecting it to be around third. This highlights a slight difference between what managers say publicly and act on in reality.
For PreSales leaders: Have you thoughtfully considered how you can consistently and accurately measure this ability? From our perspective, the options are:
- Competency-based questions: These are OK but have limitations. One thing is knowing what to do; another is actually doing it. Recounting war stories may be rosier than the battle itself.
- References: From experience across hundreds of PreSales recruiting processes, I believe a reference from a trusted source who has worked closely with the candidate can provide useful insight.
- Job samples: As already happens with the demo stage, replicating a real-life scenario provides the opportunity to tangibly see how a candidate will operate in the heat of the moment. This is especially useful for AE/SC interactions, as critical moments tend to arrive in emotionally charged and pressured situations. We believe this approach is the most effective, but don’t yet have data to back this up.
- Psychometrics: Working effectively with sales execs requires emotional intelligence and the ability to set limits. Psychometric tests can provide additional context to build on in interviews but are not recommended as a stand-alone way to assess. As a shameless plug, at Bright Dynamics we have built the profession’s first PreSales-specific psychometric assessments, partnering with Sova Assessments.
From the perspective of individual contributors, there are ways in an interview to demonstrate your ability to partner with AEs:
- Go to the interview prepared with clear, concise examples of how you’ve partnered with AEs. PreSales managers want to see that you can tread the line between standing your ground and developing a partnership of equals through emotional intelligence and competency. Equally important to managers is the balance between resolving any conflict.
- Consider asking an AE or sales leader you’ve worked with to serve as a reference.
- Show by doing, or at least show by charming. AEs and sales heads may interview you, and getting their thumbs up helps greatly. Ask the sales leader questions like, “What have you seen the best SEs bring to the opportunities they work on?” then tailor your answers to those specific areas.
How Assessment Methods are Used and Rated
Our takeaway: We can make the interview process faster and more effective.
It’s notable that the best-rated assessment methods are those where hiring managers are directly involved, namely the hiring manager 1-2-1 and the panel stage interview. Conversely, those interviews carried out by a senior non-hiring manager — normally a sales head or PreSales VP — only receive a 19% high rating and those carried out by SC peers only a 21% high rating. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there!
This raises a question: If an interview process is already too long, leading to dropouts of eligible candidates and a slower time-to-hire, why are we including assessment methods like senior non-hiring manager interviews in the process? As Greg Holmes pointed out in our report launch video, these stakeholders can be incorporated into the panel stage, giving them the chance to participate in the process without slowing it down.
Interviewing as a Key Competency
Our takeaway: Just like demoing, interviewing is a skill that improves with training.
The results speak for themselves. The question is why is there so little training and what is the impact?
Perhaps interviewing is not close enough to a manager’s core skills for it to be on their radar (like demo or product training would be) or maybe accountability for interview training is not clear between PreSales organisations, HR, and talent acquisition, so nobody ends up owning it. Maybe the downside of limited training is not quantifiable, because quality of hire is not measured.
In terms of the impact, there is clearly a significant difference in business impact between a bad hire, good hire, and great hire. As Malcolm Murphy points out in our launch conversation, it’s not just the cost of bad hires, it’s the cost of would-have-been great hires that you passed on. Like demoing or discovery, while interviewing is something that capable individuals can figure out on their own, there will be inconsistencies and reduced capabilities across the organization without training.
Intuition and Decision Making
Our takeaway: Create an environment of “informed intuition.”
It’s apparent that PreSales hiring managers rely heavily on intuition, what’s more with a strong bias to their own intuition vs. others, as demonstrated previously where respondents rate their own interviews as most effective.
Most would agree that there is a balance to strike between listening to your gut and testing it against tangible proof points. As Greg and Malcolm outlined here:
In the report we have labeled this as “informed intuition,” with a structured hiring process as the best context for intuition to operate within. This would include:
- A clearly defined skills and competencies matrix, shared with the hiring team, assigning certain competencies as special focus areas to each interviewer. For example, if an AE interviews a candidate, they can focus on sales acumen.
- Use varied assessment methods to create as many data points as possible (without making the process longer). Try a combination or competency questions, achievement-based questions, job samples, and psychometrics.
- Six months into a hire’s tenure, go back to the interviewer ratings at the point of hire, review them on a competency-by-competency basis through quality of hire measurements to uncover intuition blind spots.
- Improve hiring manager interview skills through PreSales-specific training and support from PreSales hiring mentors (those who score best in quality of hire metrics). Video-based learning opens additional possibilities.
Our takeaway: Quality of hire management is mere guesswork — without the right metrics.
When it comes to hiring, how do you know how well you are doing?
Given the difference in outcomes between a bad hire and a superstar hire, most PreSales leaders would agree quality is paramount, yet 73% don’t measure quality in a structured manner.
Clearly, most managers have a general idea of which hires have worked well and which haven’t. This may be true directionally, but it lacks depth, and fails to reveal ways you can improve.
In the report we recommend this zero-cost, low-effort alternative.
- At the point of hire, request every interviewer rate the new hire with an overall score, as well as a score against every competency included in the interviewing scorecard (keep it at around five to maintain simplicity).
- At six months and 12 months, score the new hire again with on-the-job scorings across competencies, along with an overall rating.
- With this information, over time you can start to evaluate how well you are assessing with improved precision.
Once you have this data for multiple hires, you’ll begin to see which competencies your hiring process is effective at measuring (e.g., demos and presenting) and which areas it’s less effective at measuring (e.g., resilience and grit). From there you can tweak your interviewing process to alleviate blind spots.
What’s more, you’ll collect data on how effective different interviewers are. Where the data suggests interviewers are assessing poorly, you can train and develop (or in the case of sales leaders, have some welcome data). Where interviewers show a proven track record of consistently understanding candidate strengths and weakness, you can involve them more in improving the organisation’s overall hiring capability (e.g., creating hiring manager champions and mentors or involving them in assessment design).
Additionally, you can build a picture of which hiring sources — career page applicants, employee referrals, talent acquisition sourced, agency sourced — are most effective.
Summary
“Hiring is the most important thing I do. You hire the right people and the rest takes care of itself, if you hire the wrong people … the rest takes care of itself.”
— Dave Schultz, Global head of Solutions Consulting
We believe the survey shows us that hiring is important yet challenging. We believe the actions we’ve suggested will help:
- Increase speed and reduce complexity through consolidating secondary stakeholders like sales leaders into the panel stage.
- Increase structure without allowing interviewing to become too rigid or impersonal.
- Incorporate job samples beyond the demo, especially for AE/SC collaboration and discovery.
- Provide more PreSales-specific interview training and mentoring.
- Measure the quality of hire, use the data to continually improve assessment, increase hiring team accountability, and identify hiring champions and mentors.
- Create an environment of “informed intuition” through structure, training, and support.
Read the full report here: https://bit.ly/42PnkUI
Listen to our series of conversations with hiring managers and PreSales thought leaders here: https://www.brightdynamics.co.uk/hireside-chats/
Learn about our PreSales competency model here: https://www.brightdynamics.co.uk/presales-candidate-assessment/
About John Hodgson
John is the founder and director of Bright Dynamics, the PreSales profession’s first dedicated recruiting firm, Bright Dynamics works with companies like SAP, Adobe and Slack to build their PreSales teams globally.
When it comes to hiring, John has developed an approach tailored for PreSales that places quality-of-hire at the centre. This methodology is the culmination of 18 years’ experience front-line recruiting in tech alongside 100’s of PreSales-specific searches, cherry picking the best habits and techniques of the PreSales leaders he’s worked with.
John is based in the Sintra region of Portugal where you can find him out in nature, cooking up a barbecue or at the beach making sandcastles with his five-year-old.
Surveying 100+ PreSales leaders to find out their real beliefs
“In the first part of my career, I only thought about hiring when I had a vacancy; the second you get the offer out to a candidate, you wipe the sweat off your brow and you go back to your job. That’s the wrong mindset, hiring is job number one of a leader.”
— Malcolm Murphy, Vice President, Solution Engineering
This quote was taken from the launch video of a report we recently released around hiring in PreSales. I think it points to an uncomfortable truth: Your ability to make the right hires over time can make or break your PreSales team. Yet all too often, how we go about hiring is not given due consideration until the urgent need to fill a role is upon us.
This reactivity leads to more instances of rejected offers, needlessly protracted hiring processes, suboptimal hires, and the unwitting rejection of candidates who would otherwise have been stellar hires — resulting, ultimately, in less capable teams and poorer business outcomes.
To understand the current state of hiring in PreSales, we surveyed 103 PreSales leaders from around the world, asking 54 questions relating to:
- What candidate characteristics lead to high performance on the job.
- How these characteristics are measured in the hiring process.
- How the effectiveness of the interview process itself is measured and improved.
Of those surveyed, the split between first-level managers and second level or above was even, with an average team size of 27 per respondent. Participants were mainly based in EMEA and North America and predominantly worked at tier 1 or scale-up enterprise SaaS vendors.
Key Findings
We believe the results of the survey show the PreSales profession has the opportunity to professionalise further and get better hiring results.
- Only 50% of hiring teams initiate the hiring process with a clearly defined matrix of skills and competencies to measure. Only 46% have and share this with the hiring team.
- Only 33% of PreSales leaders are satisfied or very satisfied with the interview training they have received across their career.
- 22% of PreSales leaders haven’t received any interview training.
- 73% of PreSales organisations do not measure quality of hire.
- PreSales managers have a strong bias toward making hiring decisions based on the interviews they're involved in. At the same time, their decision leads with ‘gut feel,’ with 58% rating their use of intuition at 8/10 importance or higher.
Delving into the findings
Let’s look more specifically at how participants responded to survey questions.
What PreSales Leaders Look For
Our takeaway: Since “partnering effectively in account teams” topped the list of job components, it’s worth measuring effectively.
We were surprised to see “effective collaboration with account teams” (i.e., partnering effectively with AEs) to be the most important job component — we were expecting it to be around third. This highlights a slight difference between what managers say publicly and act on in reality.
For PreSales leaders: Have you thoughtfully considered how you can consistently and accurately measure this ability? From our perspective, the options are:
- Competency-based questions: These are OK but have limitations. One thing is knowing what to do; another is actually doing it. Recounting war stories may be rosier than the battle itself.
- References: From experience across hundreds of PreSales recruiting processes, I believe a reference from a trusted source who has worked closely with the candidate can provide useful insight.
- Job samples: As already happens with the demo stage, replicating a real-life scenario provides the opportunity to tangibly see how a candidate will operate in the heat of the moment. This is especially useful for AE/SC interactions, as critical moments tend to arrive in emotionally charged and pressured situations. We believe this approach is the most effective, but don’t yet have data to back this up.
- Psychometrics: Working effectively with sales execs requires emotional intelligence and the ability to set limits. Psychometric tests can provide additional context to build on in interviews but are not recommended as a stand-alone way to assess. As a shameless plug, at Bright Dynamics we have built the profession’s first PreSales-specific psychometric assessments, partnering with Sova Assessments.
From the perspective of individual contributors, there are ways in an interview to demonstrate your ability to partner with AEs:
- Go to the interview prepared with clear, concise examples of how you’ve partnered with AEs. PreSales managers want to see that you can tread the line between standing your ground and developing a partnership of equals through emotional intelligence and competency. Equally important to managers is the balance between resolving any conflict.
- Consider asking an AE or sales leader you’ve worked with to serve as a reference.
- Show by doing, or at least show by charming. AEs and sales heads may interview you, and getting their thumbs up helps greatly. Ask the sales leader questions like, “What have you seen the best SEs bring to the opportunities they work on?” then tailor your answers to those specific areas.
How Assessment Methods are Used and Rated
Our takeaway: We can make the interview process faster and more effective.
It’s notable that the best-rated assessment methods are those where hiring managers are directly involved, namely the hiring manager 1-2-1 and the panel stage interview. Conversely, those interviews carried out by a senior non-hiring manager — normally a sales head or PreSales VP — only receive a 19% high rating and those carried out by SC peers only a 21% high rating. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there!
This raises a question: If an interview process is already too long, leading to dropouts of eligible candidates and a slower time-to-hire, why are we including assessment methods like senior non-hiring manager interviews in the process? As Greg Holmes pointed out in our report launch video, these stakeholders can be incorporated into the panel stage, giving them the chance to participate in the process without slowing it down.
Interviewing as a Key Competency
Our takeaway: Just like demoing, interviewing is a skill that improves with training.
The results speak for themselves. The question is why is there so little training and what is the impact?
Perhaps interviewing is not close enough to a manager’s core skills for it to be on their radar (like demo or product training would be) or maybe accountability for interview training is not clear between PreSales organisations, HR, and talent acquisition, so nobody ends up owning it. Maybe the downside of limited training is not quantifiable, because quality of hire is not measured.
In terms of the impact, there is clearly a significant difference in business impact between a bad hire, good hire, and great hire. As Malcolm Murphy points out in our launch conversation, it’s not just the cost of bad hires, it’s the cost of would-have-been great hires that you passed on. Like demoing or discovery, while interviewing is something that capable individuals can figure out on their own, there will be inconsistencies and reduced capabilities across the organization without training.
Intuition and Decision Making
Our takeaway: Create an environment of “informed intuition.”
It’s apparent that PreSales hiring managers rely heavily on intuition, what’s more with a strong bias to their own intuition vs. others, as demonstrated previously where respondents rate their own interviews as most effective.
Most would agree that there is a balance to strike between listening to your gut and testing it against tangible proof points. As Greg and Malcolm outlined here:
In the report we have labeled this as “informed intuition,” with a structured hiring process as the best context for intuition to operate within. This would include:
- A clearly defined skills and competencies matrix, shared with the hiring team, assigning certain competencies as special focus areas to each interviewer. For example, if an AE interviews a candidate, they can focus on sales acumen.
- Use varied assessment methods to create as many data points as possible (without making the process longer). Try a combination or competency questions, achievement-based questions, job samples, and psychometrics.
- Six months into a hire’s tenure, go back to the interviewer ratings at the point of hire, review them on a competency-by-competency basis through quality of hire measurements to uncover intuition blind spots.
- Improve hiring manager interview skills through PreSales-specific training and support from PreSales hiring mentors (those who score best in quality of hire metrics). Video-based learning opens additional possibilities.
Our takeaway: Quality of hire management is mere guesswork — without the right metrics.
When it comes to hiring, how do you know how well you are doing?
Given the difference in outcomes between a bad hire and a superstar hire, most PreSales leaders would agree quality is paramount, yet 73% don’t measure quality in a structured manner.
Clearly, most managers have a general idea of which hires have worked well and which haven’t. This may be true directionally, but it lacks depth, and fails to reveal ways you can improve.
In the report we recommend this zero-cost, low-effort alternative.
- At the point of hire, request every interviewer rate the new hire with an overall score, as well as a score against every competency included in the interviewing scorecard (keep it at around five to maintain simplicity).
- At six months and 12 months, score the new hire again with on-the-job scorings across competencies, along with an overall rating.
- With this information, over time you can start to evaluate how well you are assessing with improved precision.
Once you have this data for multiple hires, you’ll begin to see which competencies your hiring process is effective at measuring (e.g., demos and presenting) and which areas it’s less effective at measuring (e.g., resilience and grit). From there you can tweak your interviewing process to alleviate blind spots.
What’s more, you’ll collect data on how effective different interviewers are. Where the data suggests interviewers are assessing poorly, you can train and develop (or in the case of sales leaders, have some welcome data). Where interviewers show a proven track record of consistently understanding candidate strengths and weakness, you can involve them more in improving the organisation’s overall hiring capability (e.g., creating hiring manager champions and mentors or involving them in assessment design).
Additionally, you can build a picture of which hiring sources — career page applicants, employee referrals, talent acquisition sourced, agency sourced — are most effective.
Summary
“Hiring is the most important thing I do. You hire the right people and the rest takes care of itself, if you hire the wrong people … the rest takes care of itself.”
— Dave Schultz, Global head of Solutions Consulting
We believe the survey shows us that hiring is important yet challenging. We believe the actions we’ve suggested will help:
- Increase speed and reduce complexity through consolidating secondary stakeholders like sales leaders into the panel stage.
- Increase structure without allowing interviewing to become too rigid or impersonal.
- Incorporate job samples beyond the demo, especially for AE/SC collaboration and discovery.
- Provide more PreSales-specific interview training and mentoring.
- Measure the quality of hire, use the data to continually improve assessment, increase hiring team accountability, and identify hiring champions and mentors.
- Create an environment of “informed intuition” through structure, training, and support.
Read the full report here: https://bit.ly/42PnkUI
Listen to our series of conversations with hiring managers and PreSales thought leaders here: https://www.brightdynamics.co.uk/hireside-chats/
Learn about our PreSales competency model here: https://www.brightdynamics.co.uk/presales-candidate-assessment/
About John Hodgson
John is the founder and director of Bright Dynamics, the PreSales profession’s first dedicated recruiting firm, Bright Dynamics works with companies like SAP, Adobe and Slack to build their PreSales teams globally.
When it comes to hiring, John has developed an approach tailored for PreSales that places quality-of-hire at the centre. This methodology is the culmination of 18 years’ experience front-line recruiting in tech alongside 100’s of PreSales-specific searches, cherry picking the best habits and techniques of the PreSales leaders he’s worked with.
John is based in the Sintra region of Portugal where you can find him out in nature, cooking up a barbecue or at the beach making sandcastles with his five-year-old.
