Sales Hiring Scorecard

About scorecards and my specific SDR/BDR/AE hiring scorecards.

I got asked about sales hiring frameworks in the Topline slack so I figured I would share some of my approach to scorecards. This is a version of a document that I’ve used for years and I haven’t cleaned it up much to be newsletter material. Hopefully it’s helpful.

One important note: Your scorecard weightings will change depending on the type of role. We’re SMB so even my AE scorecard is heavily weighted for DNA. If you’re hiring enterprise reps, you’ll be able to weight much more heavily on Craft and Specialized knowledge. If I was hiring an Enterprise AE in a technical space like cybersecurity, I might have a 30-40% weighting on each Specialized Knowledge and Craft.

Asad Zaman and I went deep on the topic here:

About Scorecards

Scorecards are a useful tool so that we evaluate consistently across candidates and hiring managers. They are also a tool to help reduce cognitive bias and make great decisions quickly. Nobel Prize winning behavioural economist, Daniel Kahneman, writes about this in his book “Thinking Fast & Slow” (video summary). Kahneman argues, “intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits.”

Kahneman’s approach to scorecards:

1. Create a structured set of questions to prevent the interviewer from simply pursuing the questions that they find most interesting,

2. Use the limited time available to obtain as much information as possible about the interviewee's life in their normal environment,

3. Do not make decisions solely on the basis of interviewers' global evaluations

4. Rely upon statistical summaries of separately evaluated attributes.

Scorecard Framework Summary

SDR

1. DNA (75%)

2. Craft (15%)

3. Specialized Knowledge (10%)

BDR

1. DNA (60%)

2. Craft (25%)

3. Specialized Knowledge (15%)

AE

1. DNA (50%)

2. Craft (35%)

3. Specialized Knowledge (15%)

DNA (50% weighting)

Most Important, Hardest/Unfeasible to Teach

Mindset

Drive

• Ambitious

• Competitive

• Goal oriented

• Gritty