Determining Traits 🧑🌾👩🏽💻👨🏼🏫👩✈️🧑🏾⚖️
How to determine traits that predict candidate success
Hey, a quick note before we jump in.
At 10:30 AM CST on April 22nd I’m a part of a free Fortune’s Path Webinar called “How to Attract, Develop, and Keep Good People.” If you’d like to attend you can register here:
Tom from Fortune’s Path is a very thoughtful leader, I hope you can make it!
Ben
Determining Traits 🧑🌾👩🏽💻👨🏼🏫👩✈️🧑🏾⚖️
How to determine traits that predict candidate success
A few weeks ago, I wrote several posts on job descriptions. First off, thank you to those who provided feedback, and I hope many of you had an opportunity to try out the concepts I discussed.
But let’s be honest, writing a job description is a clearer-cut task than evaluating candidates. So, in this series, I will talk about assessing candidates and, specifically, how to define and evaluate traits you need for a given role. I’ll use my recent experience hiring Account Executives to walkthrough:
Skills vs. Traits
The three traits I look for in an AE candidate
How I determined those traits
When I evaluate each trait and why
This post discusses my framework for thinking about traits and finding the ones with the highest correlation to candidate success. In next week’s post, I dive in a bit more on the specific traits themselves and detail how I evaluate each one.
Skills vs. Traits
Let’s start with the difference between skills and traits.
Skills are learned abilities and are usually pretty easy to measure with work sample tests. For example: building a financial model, writing code, and running a sales call are skills.
On the other hand, traits tend to be more intrinsic and harder to change, which also makes them much harder to evaluate. They are usually best assessed during the interview stage.
For this post, I’m ignoring skills and focusing on traits.
The three traits I look for in Account Executives
There are three traits that I look for in every Account Executive I interview, they are:
Curiosity - Is this person genuinely curious about other people and organizations? Are they eager to learn, and do they ask great second and third-level questions to understand the customer?
Self Accountability - Can this person diagnose areas for improvement, design systems to help them improve, and successfully apply their system?
Coachability - Can this person accept and, more importantly, apply feedback? Can they do so judiciously (i.e., can they determine what feedback is valuable and which isn’t)?
That’s it. Yes, there are other things I look for and measure, but they’re not nearly as important as those three.
How I determined the traits
Before returning to sales management, I spent about five years in product management, where I built products to evaluate and assess people’s abilities.
When it became my responsibility to hire salespeople, I applied the same test and learn strategy that I used to build products. To get a bit more specific, I:
Got ideas from experts - I didn’t want to start from zero, so I reached out to several sales leaders and asked them what traits they thought mattered. I also asked successful salespeople, read books, and generally used my network to get a few starting traits.
Tested my assumptions - Once I had a list of traits, I tried them on candidates and successful salespeople I knew. It is essential to develop a clear, quantifiable rubric to score each candidate’s answer at this stage.
Looked at the data - Having clear, quantifiable results from each candidate gives you a reasonably clear picture of what works and what doesn’t, particularly if you’re hiring lots of one position.
Made adjustments as necessary - If something performed better at predicting candidate success and was easier to implement, it replaced traits that didn’t perform well.
Repeat - Your company, industry, and needs will change. You’re never “done” determining what traits are most important. Constant iteration is (and should be) a fact of life.
When you think about it, it’s not too different from how most things improve over time. It’s how product people build products, analysts build models, food scientists make Pop-Tarts, and comedians write jokes.
When I evaluate each trait and why
Once you know what trait you’re measuring, the next step is to determine when you’ll measure it. This part of the process is much more straightforward than the earlier steps. This one is simple: evaluate the most predictive traits first.
Next Steps
In my next posts, I’ll detail each trait that I look for and how I measure it. The goal will be to demonstrate, as practically as possible, how you can go about building your process for finding, evaluating, and improving the traits you need.
Until then, have a great week!