Case Studies Technology Company Improves Sales Performance while Saving Hundreds of Recruiting Hours

The Challenge

A large software company wanted to find a better way to prioritize the high volume of applicants they receive for their entry level sales role. With thousands of applicants applying each year, the recruiting team needed a more efficient, objective, and predictive way to select which candidates to move through the hiring funnel and ultimately hire.

Beyond improving the efficiency of the selection process, the organization also wanted to maintain a positive candidate experience, while simultaneously improving their quality of hire.

The Solution

The company partnered with Criteria to begin administering assessments to their entry level sales candidates. Because the company was facing such a high volume of applicants, they decided to use the assessments at the beginning of the process, right after the candidate submits an application.

In this new process, candidates are asked to take two assessments:

• Cognitive assessment: The CCAT (Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test) measures critical thinking, problem solving, and learning ability. For entry-level roles, the assessment is particularly useful at predicting how well a new hire will pick up on training.
   
• Personality assessment: The EPP (Employee Personality Profile) measures 12 key personality traits that are associated with a person’s work styles. By applying a job match for sales, the EPP can predict which candidates are most likely to excel in a sales role based on their personality and behavioral traits.

Once candidates pass the assessments, a recruiter reaches out to the candidate to schedule a phone screen, followed by a virtual interview panel, before an offer is extended.

The Results

After using the assessments for less than a year, the company experienced significant improvements across a wide range of metrics, including better sales performance, time savings, and a positive candidate experience.

Better Sales Performance

After just a few months of using the assessments, the company worked with Criteria to conduct an internal study to see how well the tests were predicting performance. The study focused on 243 reps and found that those who scored higher on both assessments generated more leads and revenue than their peers. The CCAT and EPP scores correlated with all six job performance metrics that the team looked at. More specifically, the study found that those who scored higher on both assessments had:
 

The recruiting team also estimates that, had they been using the assessments in the past, 47% of their recent terminations could have been prevented, which would have saved the company an estimated $782,000 in turnover costs. 

More Time Saved

Before they started using Criteria’s assessments, the recruiting team had to manually review applications in order to decide who to invite to the phone screen stage. By adding the assessments to the beginning of the process, the recruiting team estimates that they save about 16 hours of manager time per month, and about 14 hours of recruiter time per month.

Higher Offer Acceptance Rates

One of the recruiting team’s goals was to reduce the number of interviews it takes to get to one hire. In other words, they wanted to decrease the conversion ratio from phone screen to offer acceptance by 5%.

Before using assessments, they averaged 6 manager phone screens for one offer acceptance. Now that they are using the assessments, they now average 4.3 manager phone screens for one offer acceptance. This represents a 28% reduction of the conversion rate, far outpacing their goal of 5%.

According to the recruiting team, this decrease can be attributed to better quality candidates getting invited to the interview stage. “Managers spend more of their time now speaking to candidates that will actually make it to the end of the process,” the recruiting team shares. “So each manager phone screen kind of counts for more.”

A More Objective, Predictive Process

One of the biggest challenges of hiring for the entry-level sales role is that most of the candidates don’t have prior experience or hard skills that can be used to decide who to hire. The recruiting team adds:

“With sales, a lot of the skills are hard to see on paper, they’re more like soft skills. We have historically looked for folks with experience, or have kind of weeded out folks without experience. But what we have learned is that there are a lot of recent hires that actually have been really successful in the role who may not have your traditional sales background that we would historically look for. So the assessment really helps us zoom in on those profiles that we might overlook… they might actually be a diamond in the rough."

Positive Candidate Experience

Before implementing the assessments, the organization was worried that that the assessments could negatively impact the candidate experience, because it would add an additional step into the process 
and delay the first touchpoint with a recruiter.

To monitor this metric, the company uses a candidate NPS (net promoter score) that is tracked biweekly. Prior to the assessments, the candidate NPS was at a healthy 61, and a year after the assessments were incorporated into the process, the NPS remains at 61. In addition, the NPS for the entry-level sales role is significantly higher than the NPS for other roles at the company. Ultimately the assessments have enabled the company to maintain their high candidate satisfaction ratings, while also increasing the efficiency of the recruiting team.

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Based on these early results demonstrating that the assessments help to drive better sales performance, save time for recruiters and managers, all while maintaining a positive candidate experience, the company has decided to expand the use of the assessments to their entire sales team.