26 May What is the Best Personality Profile for Hiring a New Producer?
What is the best personality profile for Hiring a New Producer?
There are a lot of personality profiles and frankly, they use similar science to make their recommendations. However, these two critical factors differentiate them.
- Was the profile developed to hire sales people or the population in general? There is a big difference.
- Was it built to prevent cheating or gaming the system?
Experienced sales people have taken enough of these profiles to know how to answer the questions in a way that favors them more so than getting the truth out of them. When that happens you get false data. False data leads to poor decision making. We have an instance where a sales candidate took a profile a year ago in an effort to get a job and he didn't get hired because he didn't have the energy, the ability to deal with rejection and many other factors. He took the same profile recently for a different client and this time came out looking good. He has learned how to game the system. Having an element to prevent gaming the system is critical. One profile that does a very good job of that is Craftmetrics….
If you are an Agency Owner, I would be happy to give you personally a free assessment so you can see for yourself. The profile can be found at www.thewedge.net/assessments/. It measures 10 primary traits and 10 secondary traits for salespeople. Here are a couple of factors that you'll want the appropriate score on.
Intensity and Drive…. If someone is not driven to be successful in sales, particularly selling commercial insurance, they are bound to fail. It's just too hard in the first 2-4 years for someone not driven to succeed.
Independence… high scorers want to work alone, without supervision. They enjoy situations where they are in control of the outcome of their efforts. If you wanted to hire a staff person, it would be just the opposite, team work and being compliant are much more important.
Here are a few of the Secondary Traits:
- Confidence/Persistence to Close the Sales
- Charisma to influence other to Buy
- Proficiency to manage time
- Receptivity to Coaching
Craftmetrics is great profile, but it's only 1/3 of the decision making… look for my blog on the 3 Dimensions of Success if you want to improve your hiring effectiveness.
For more information on hiring and developing great producers and Sales Assessment Tools.
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