Why I Use AI in My Sales Hiring Process — and Why You Should, Too

As a enterprise chief, you already know: Hiring is difficult. A resume hardly ever offers you an excellent indication of a candidate’s abilities. Interviews, in the meantime, are sometimes laden with bias — which creates a damaging expertise for candidates and would not provide help to hone in on the most effective expertise.

Expertise assessments have lengthy been the gold customary for hiring greatest practices. Not like resumes, abilities assessments can present a practical work simulation by asking candidates to do duties much like these they’d actually do on the job — like programming a small software, for instance. Prime firms like Google and Meta use job-relevant abilities assessments as step one of their hiring course of for many of their engineering and different technical roles, generally even instead of a resume overview.

However till lately, creating an evaluation for non-technical roles that simulates duties like a gross sales name or buyer escalation was difficult. The very best we may do was ask candidates to make a mock pitch to one in every of our gross sales leaders or a follow presentation to a panel. It was time-intensive to schedule and conduct the interviews — and grading candidates’ efficiency on these duties in an automatic approach was even trickier.

In the present day, AI makes it completely doable to create reasonable simulations of gross sales roles in your hiring course of.

Associated: How to Use AI to Streamline Your Recruitment Practices

Utilizing AI to rent for gross sales roles

At my very own firm, we lately adopted an AI-powered technique to rent for all of our Gross sales roles. We acquired tons of of candidates for every of our open Account Government roles — and as a substitute of poring over every resume, we invited each candidate to take an automatic abilities evaluation pushed by reasonable sales-role performs and interview questions with AI dialog simulation.

This new strategy was initially met with some wholesome skepticism from friends. Some current research recommend that candidates are concerned about the use of AI tools in hiring; others, nevertheless, point out that candidates are open to AI instruments as a way to boost fairness in hiring. We weren’t positive which sentiment would dominate amongst our candidates.

After rounds of hiring, we have discovered that our candidates love the brand new course of. One applicant wrote to us after finishing the evaluation to say he was “blown away by the evaluation course of and the AI,” and one other to say it was “one of many coolest experiences” they’d throughout their job search. General, the candidates who’ve gone via this course of price it 4.3 out of 5 on consumer expertise, 4.3 out of 5 on equity and 4.5 out of 5 on job relevance.

After simply three months with our new course of, we saved our Gross sales crew over 1,500 collective hours they’d have spent conducting and prepping for interviews. This frees them as much as give attention to the work that makes the best affect: driving income.

How our course of works

Here is what our new hiring course of for Account Executives on our Gross sales crew appears to be like like, from begin to end:

1. We publish our job posting in our Applicant Tracking System (ATS), explaining what the hiring course of will appear to be for the position, and recruiters outbound to high-potential candidates.

2. Recruiters display screen candidates in a brief cellphone interview.

3. Candidates who go the preliminary display screen are robotically despatched a hyperlink from our ATS to finish a 15-minute evaluation on their very own time. On this AI-native evaluation, candidates role-play job-relevant gross sales eventualities in a dialog simulation.

4. Through the evaluation, the candidate engages in a number of job related eventualities. These would possibly embrace making an outbound name to a cold prospect, drafting an e mail to e-book a gathering and talking on a discovery name to qualify the chance.

5. The evaluation then robotically scores the candidate’s efficiency in keeping with standards that matter for every position.

6. Our recruiting crew then opinions the outcomes from candidates who accomplished the assessments, diving deeper into the transcripts of a candidate’s interactions when wanted. They then choose candidates to advance to the following stage, prioritizing these with increased scores.

7. We then have our gross sales crew interview a a lot smaller pool of candidates to construct on the role-plays they engaged in with the AI agent, ask follow-up questions and hone in on crew and company fit.

8. After this, we transfer to the supply stage for the best-qualified candidate.

Associated: 13 Benefits of Using AI-Powered Applicant Tracking Systems

What we have discovered about utilizing AI to interview

Whereas we had been implementing and iterating on this new hiring technique, we discovered just a few classes that considerably improved the standard of the sign we had been in a position to get from AI-powered interviews — in addition to the candidate experience.

First, we discovered that for AI-powered conversations to successfully establish candidates expert at speaking with clients and prospects, the dialog wanted to really feel actual. This required utilizing an AI dialog agent particularly educated to acknowledge, as an illustration, when somebody is pausing briefly of their speech versus ready for a response so it may keep away from interrupting its dialog companion.

Second, we discovered that the scoring mechanism for the AI wanted to be calibrated to evaluate the particular abilities that mattered for the roles we had been hiring for. To do that, we examined the instrument with our current crew of salespeople and used their suggestions on their interview and outcomes to refine our scoring standards.

Fixing for these allowed us to construct a gross sales hiring course of that realistically simulated the role-play interviews previously carried out by our salespeople, however with drastically fewer assets and with much more consistency in scoring candidates’ efficiency.

The way forward for AI in hiring

Wanting forward, I predict that the usage of an AI-enhanced hiring course of just like the one my firm has adopted will grow to be the norm somewhat than the exception. The power of AI to realistically simulate a human dialog will solely proceed to enhance as this expertise advances, and the immense scalability of AI-powered hiring solutions will quickly make them a enterprise necessity — particularly for firms that obtain a excessive quantity of job purposes.

In the event that they take a considerate strategy, firms of any measurement have a lot to realize from integrating AI into their hiring technique ahead of later.

Associated: How Integrating AI Into Recruitment Can Benefit Companies Facing a Labor Crisis