The value of salespeople for your company is obvious; as they are responsible for sales, they directly make money for the company. However, at first glance, it’s not easy to see if someone would make a good salesperson. Salespeople are famous for being able to present themselves (“sell themselves”) well. During sales recruitment, how can you tell if a candidate is just “selling” him or herself or if they would truly make a great addition to your sales team?
Read on to discover more challenges in hiring salespeople, and how to overcome some of these difficulties by gaining valuable insights from body pose and face recognition technology.
While hard skills can be seen in a resume, soft skills are harder to identify but are important for sales recruitment.
Top sales talent is in demand, and it is difficult to find and hire them. According to data gathered by LinkedIn, persuasion is the second most in-demand soft skill that companies need in 2019. Sales leadership is also included among the 25 most in-demand soft skills of this year. However, there is not enough supply to meet demand; in some parts of the world such as the US and Germany, the unemployment rates are the lowest since decades, and labor markets are in the candidates’ favor.
Unfortunately, certain traditional interview methods are inefficient and ineffective. A study even shows that interview predictions have very little correlation with job performance, with some showing that the interview was even harmful to hiring decisions and that blind selection would have led to better results. Moreover, interviews are commonly subject to interview bias and can be ineffective at identifying soft skills.
Some personality tests commonly used in recruiting, such as the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator, have been found to lack high validity, meaning it may be a waste of resources to use them for recruitment purposes.
There are certain soft skills and personality traits which can be indicators of good salespeople. For example, assertiveness, empathy, and optimism. But as a recruiter scanning through sales candidate profiles, how can you spot these traits? A sales candidate may be confident and have good self-presentation skills, but may not have other traits necessary for the job. Sixty-eight percent of talent professionals assess soft skills by picking up on social cues during interviews. Since interviews are limited in time and interviewers are subject to unconscious bias, it is time to adopt a more effective way of identifying soft skills.
Artificial intelligence can give quick, valuable insights for potential hiring matches.
Someone will make a first impression in under seven seconds, and body language has a great influence. In fact, nonverbal cues have four times the impact on the impression you make than the words you speak! Artificial intelligence can now aid you in reading candidates’ body language and emotion through face recognition and analyze these features together with verbal expression to create personality trait profiles and identify hard-to-spot soft skills.
Software algorithms have been created from a wide breadth of images and videos. From these images, parameters such as facial features are analyzed, signifying various emotions. In addition to software algorithms, Retorio created a database with more than 10,000 video clips of peoples’ reactions to presenters in order to see how people respond to these presenters and if they find them authentic. In this way, artificial intelligence can “read” body and facial language as well as vocal tones to decipher how honest or enthusiastic a candidate may be.
Fifty-seven percent of talent professionals currently struggle to accurately assess soft skills, yet they realize their importance. Eighty-nine percent of talent professionals said that a new hire didn’t work out because they lacked soft skills. Personality tests and traditional interview techniques don’t seem to be doing the trick, and moreover, recruiters only have a limited time to evaluate each candidate.
Now you can go ahead and skip some of the traditional interview methods and cumbersome personality tests! Artificial intelligence can be a recruiter’s best friend by giving you emotion recognition insights from analyzing facial expressions, body movement, and language to help you narrow down your list of potential candidates. This allows you to spend precious face-to-face time just with the resulting best matches.
Retorio’s artificial intelligence software uses face recognition and analyzes emotion and body pose to create a personality trait and soft skill profile of candidates, allowing recruiters to make smarter sales recruitment decisions.
References
Petrone, Paul. “The Skills Companies Need Most in 2019 - And How to Learn Them.” 1 Jan 2019, LinkedIn The Learning Blog, https://learning.linkedin.com/blog/top-skills/the-skills-companies-need-most-in-2019--and-how-to-learn-them.
Cespedes, Frank and Weinfurter, Daniel. “The Best Ways to Hire Salespeople.” 2 Nov 2015, Harvard Business Review. http://www.sjdm.org/journal/12/121130a/jdm121130a.html.
Winterhalter, Benjamin. “ISTJ? ENFP? Careers hinge on a dubious personality test.” 31 Aug 2014, Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/08/30/istj-enfp-careers-hinge-dubious-personality-test/8ptUGXhu6DndFdjCngcxSN/story.html.
Lobosco, Mark. “LinkedIn Report: These 4 Ideas Are Shaping the Future of HR and Hiring.” 28 Jan 2019, LinkedIn, https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/trends-and-research/2019/global-recruiting-trends-2019.
Goman, Carol Kinsey. “5 Ways Body Language Impacts Leadership Results.” 26 Aug 2018, Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolkinseygoman/2018/08/26/5-ways-body-language-impacts-leadership-results/#42650e26536a.