The best business development reps (BDRs) and sales development reps (SDRs) are personable, tenacious, and hungry for success.
Usually, the best way to hire them is to engage with them one-on-one to truly assess their capabilities. While this is still critical at later stages of the interview process, it’s too time consuming for high-volume hiring in the early stages. The process becomes a hassle between interview scheduling, test calls, and more.
If you’re in growth mode, asynchronous interviews are a key tool in your recruiting box. Here’s how they work and how they empower high volume BDR hiring for all stages of companies.
Where asynchronous interviews fit in the sales rep recruiting process
A typical sales rep interview process needs to uncover three things: competency for the role, culture fit, and the general personality of your would-be rep.
Asynchronous video interviews are a fantastic way to get a baseline for personality and culture fit, particularly in the early stages of interviewing.
Here’s how it could look:
Make your application async video: Good salespeople come from all backgrounds, so there’s little to screen for on a resume. Instead, give candidates the opportunity to introduce themselves with a short asynchronous video.
Use async video instead of a phone screen: Instead of a recruiter booking a call (and inviting multiple scheduling headaches), ask candidates to record short video answers to key questions like talking about their background, why they want to work for your company, or sharing a specific experience you’d like to know about.
Leverage async video to help candidates prepare for cold-call tests: Every sales rep will need to go through a sales call test, which of course needs to be live. But ahead of time, you can send pre-recorded videos to candidates explaining the assignment.
Create an “interviewing with us” FAQ video library: The recruiting team can answer commonly asked questions with async video on top of written answers, creating a better candidate experience by giving people multiple ways to engage and learn.
Hiring sales reps, particularly at high volumes, is about them as individuals and how the group functions and supports each other
When you hire SDRs or other high-volume junior sales roles, async video has the dual benefit of creating a better candidate experience and saving recruiter time in the screening process.
What you need to have in place to hire sales reps asynchronously
High-volume hiring of sales reps is a fun but occasionally tense process. Here’s what you should have in place to make it a success.
1. A competency framework: You can’t hire on gut feel, so build competence frameworks that will inform the questions you ask in the screening stage and the cold-call test.
2. An video tool integrated with your ATS: There are a lot of tools you can use to record videos or receive videos from candidates. The key is to ensure the tool you use integrates with your applicant tracking system so no information is lost or incorrectly shared.
3. Internal transparency and stakeholder shareability: Different stakeholders will need to know different information. Make sure your video tool has sharing functionality to accommodate this need.
4. Automations to support you: The asynchronous process should be entirely automated, including invitations, deadline email reminders, and confirmations when candidates have submitted everything.
If you need help finding a video interview tool, Willo put together a guide to the top free video interview softwares and a rubric on how to decide which video interview tool is right for your company.
Bring group elements into the process
Hiring sales reps, particularly at high volumes, is about them as individuals and how the group functions and supports each other. While this guide focused on assessing candidates as individuals, we believe it’s critical to include a group exercise near the end of your process when you have your final candidates. Ideally, this exercise will give everyone a chance to meet one another—their potential future colleagues—and you’ll be able to assess how well people work together before making offers.
With high volume hiring for any role, you need processes and tools to support you. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck in a time-consuming manual process that relies on ripping through everything just to get it done.
