10 Critical Warning Signs of a Bad Sales Candidate

Avoiding Costly Mistakes

The cost of hiring the wrong sales candidate can be excruciating. In this article, we’ll explain how to avoid that.

A full roster is a standard to aim for, but that doesn’t guarantee you’re getting an optimal salesforce. New sales hires can either make or break your team’s performance. Good hires certainly will help you sustain growth and even improve overall performance down the road, but onboarding bad candidates can cause problems much worse than a simple headache.

In any business organization, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training job candidates entails substantial costs of time, money, and effort. A recent CareerBuilder survey estimates that the average price of one bad hire in the U.S. is $15,000. That barely includes severe business impacts such as reduced productivity, lost time to hire and train more deserving candidates, tarnished output quality (your brand!), and spikes in customer attrition rate.

Bad hires — especially those with harmful emotional baggage — can also cause team morale to plummet and significantly undercut the team’s ability to maintain standards, comply with timelines, and achieve goals. Finally, bad hires rarely stay put, forcing you to go through the recruitment cycle again (sigh) and spend even more precious resources in the process.

In the case of a sales organization, hiring bad candidates directly impacts revenues and your bottom line. Indeed, you wouldn’t want anything to mess up those figures. But, unfortunately, bad sales hires come and go more often than expected. That’s because of several factors inherent in sales recruitment:

Most people think sales are straightforward. However, desperate job seekers would try their luck applying for a sales opening even if they prefer another role.
Selling is not for everyone. A successful sales career requires unique skills, experience, personality, and mindset combinations.
Sales-related certifications exist, but these are rare and are seldom industry-mandated or required as qualifications in job ads.

Given this scenario, sales recruiters need the right tools and awareness that will help them prevent mediocre candidates from ever getting a foothold. Detecting red flags well before handing out a job offer is an excellent place to start.

To help you do that, here are some of the most common telltale signs of a wrong sales candidate:

1) Low interest, enthusiasm, or motivation.

An applicant who doesn’t demonstrate enthusiasm about the role she is aiming for may show the same disinterest when making pitches on the sales floor. Of course, it is possible that your initial impression is inaccurate or that the applicant is only momentarily unmotivated. Still, even minor optics and small lapses can become real disadvantages later. As a sales recruiter, you’ll always want (visibly and genuinely) passionate, driven professionals on board.

2) Hates doing homework.

Did the candidate research your company, services, and critical movers before sending his application or attending an interview? If not, ignore the fool. If a candidate chooses not to spend time preparing, he is not worth your time. After all, selling success primarily depends on how prepared you are when engaging prospects. Only sales professionals willing to do their homework can dare hope to achieve targets.

3) Lacks basic sales competency.

Selling techniques and advanced methodologies can be learned. But don’t settle for candidates who lack even the rudimentary skill to sell themselves — especially when better candidates are around. For example, if a candidate can’t formulate a decent elevator speech to get noticed, hiring one will short-change your team.

Moreover, avoid candidates who can’t seem to listen and those who ask senseless questions. Conversely, block anyone who doesn’t ask any questions at all. Selling is a conversation; active listening and asking the right questions are essential to successful customer engagement.

4) Unprofessional behavior.

Excessive spelling/grammatical errors, sharing sensitive information about former employers, immature mannerisms, disturbing posts on social media, coarse/impolite language, and dressing way off the norm are some signs of unprofessional behavior. You’re not running a police state and have a reasonable tolerance for deviant behavior, but there’s a limit to what a competent sales organization can take. Sales is methodical and adheres to norms and best practices, primarily in B2B. Going well beyond acceptable thresholds will cause an unwanted impact on your brand or performance.

5) Bad punctuality and time management.

Managing time and respecting other people’s schedules may seem so old school, but punctuality remains high on the list of critical selling skills. You will always want sales professionals who meet timelines and rarely need to cram at the very last leg of the quarter to meet quotas.

Showing up late during client engagements shows that you lack motivation and respect for other people’s time. Few customers will be willing to wait for perennially delayed demos when a rival vendor can deliver the goods immediately. After all, the digital economy unfolds in an age of instant gratification.

6) Excessive job hopping.

Frequently switching roles or employers shows candidates struggle to follow a coherent, focused career track. Think twice before investing time and money to hire and train this type of applicant. The costs of hiring and losing workers are becoming prohibitive in highly competitive markets like B2B tech sales. In addition, frequent job hopping may also be a sign of personality flaws in the candidate that you wouldn’t want to deal with as a sales leader.

7) Underperforming career track.

On the other hand, you also need to flag candidates who have more or less held the same role and pay grade in the same company for many years. Something is wrong if a professional struggles to get a promotion for a long time and still chooses to stay. You would want highly driven sales professionals who care about their career advancement and possess reasonable ambition.

8) Lies during the interview.

Perform due diligence if a sales candidate’s online profile or submitted resume seems too good to be true. Of course, you want excellent and highly motivated sellers on your team, but you want the real deal, not counterfeit con artists. Understandably, people would like to show you their best foot forward, but excessive self-promotion to misleading and lying to recruiters is a glaring red flag.

Validate claimed certifications, degrees, and sales achievements, especially when dollar signs and other verifiable metrics accompany these. Lying about relevant experiences, even in minor aspects such as the number of months an applicant worked in a particular company, is a big deal for companies with high ethical standards. Remember, trust is the most valuable currency in sales.

9) High levels of negativity and vibes of disgruntlement.

Happy, well-balanced, and passionate people are what you need for your salesforce. Your door should be locked for candidates who demonstrate toxic levels of negativity and emotional baggage even at the onset. Applicants who regularly bad-mouth former employers and co-workers shouldn’t find a way to join your team. Candidates who think they are always the best, show excessive aggression, and take credit even for achievements for which they have minimal contributions should be shown the nearest exit. Finally, chronic complainers and whiners won’t thrive in sales — a world where getting rejected multiple times is just part of the daily grind.

10) Lack of legitimate references.

You want candidates who are proud of their professional or academic achievements and who can readily have someone authorized to verify their credentials. Sometimes, the standard practice is to provide character or professional references only upon a recruiter’s request. That is understandable, but what amounts to a red flag is when the only connection submitted is the candidate’s cousin. Always prefer candidates whose applications are backed by solid and relevant references, especially when you know or can readily reach out to these persons.

Avoid Making Bad Sales Hires… Once And For All

Having incompetent or unmotivated sellers in your team wastes valuable resources and negatively impacts morale and performance. Of course, the ideal scenario is to have a reliable system that prevents sub-par applicants from ever getting on board. However, the preceding red flags should at least alert you of common types of unwanted candidates.

Here are some final tips to remember/implement:

Don’t be desperate. Don’t settle for candidates you feel will cause headaches later on.
Create and adopt an Ideal Candidate Profile for each role in your sales team.
Do your homework. Perform background checks. Go beyond online profiles and resumes and snoop around to verify what candidates claim in their applications.
Conduct preliminary phone interviews to spare yourself the agony of actual, in-person interviews with behaviorally flawed or unprofessional candidates.
Partner with specialist recruiters or reliable talent scouts in your particular field.