Selecting Sales Personnel

Selection systems for sales personnel range from simple one step systems consisting of nothing more than an informal personal interview, to complex multiple step systems incorporating diverse mechanisms designed to gather information about applicants for sales jobs. A selection system is a set of successive “screens,” at any of which an applicant may be dropped from further consideration. Figure 12.1 is an example at anyone of the seven steps in this tern, a decision to drop the applicant may be made. Employment offers are extended to applicants surviving all seven steps. The order of use of the different screening mechanisms is related more to their helpfulness in terms of the information they secure than to the relative expense in using them.

Companies using multiple step selection systems differ as to the number of steps and their order of inclusion. Each company designs its selection system to fit its own information needs and to meet its own budgetary limitations. A selection system fulfills its main mission if it improves management’s ability to estimate success and failure probabilities. Management, in other words, because has available the information gathered through the selection system, makes more accurate estimates of the chances that a particular applicant will succeed a company sales position. As applicants “survive” through succeeding steps in the system, the additional increments of information enable increasingly accurate estimates of success and failure probabilities. Recognize, however, that no selection system is infallible; all eliminate some who would have succeeded at recommend hiring some who fail.