Talent is universal, but opportunity often isn't, especially in sales. The demographics of B2B tech sales in the US are largely male and white, and this lack of diversity can be attributed to the biased hiring process. To address this issue, the guest shares several steps to reduce bias in the hiring process. These steps include implementing a structured interview process, defining what good answers look like, using blind resume reviews, focusing on skill-based assessment, incorporating role plays and presentations, including a diverse hiring panel, and leveraging technology to remove bias. By removing bias and embracing diversity, organizations can build an elite sales force that represents their customer base and creates a more collaborative and inclusive environment.
Take Aways
Implement a structured interview process to create an equal playing field for all candidates.
Define what good, better, and best answers look like to evaluate candidates consistently.
Use blind resume reviews to reduce bias and focus on skills and qualifications.
Have talent acquisition hold back candidate information until a few hours before the interview to evaluate based on skills and experience.
Focus on skill-based assessment by evaluating candidates' ability to meet job duties and execute tasks.
Incorporate role plays and presentations to assess candidates' effectiveness in the job.
Include a diverse hiring panel to mitigate individual biases and gain multiple perspectives.
Leverage technology to streamline the hiring process and remove bias.
S., what do you notice? It's largely male and it's largely white. And as you look across the B2B tech sales landscape, the higher up in an organization you go, the more true that statement becomes. And part of the reason why those demographics exist could be due to the fact that the entire hiring process within sales is.
Loaded with bias in the process. So how do you change that? What we're going to do in this conversation is talk through a handful of steps that you can take to mitigate the amount of bias that's
involved in your hiring process.
using a structured interview [:
That allows for easier comparison among the candidates in your pipeline based on their responses. One of the steps that you should take in this is really sit down and define what good, better, best answers look like and have that balanced scorecard built out ahead of time so you know what you're evaluating.
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Removing that information reduces the level of bias and helps you focus on what matters. The skills, the qualifications and the experience now, you can decide how far you want to take that. But at least at a minimum level is always a good idea. Another idea that you can put into place to eliminate the presence of bias is that
if you have a talent acquisition function. And they're setting up interviews, they won't send you the resume of the candidate or any of the details about the candidate until an hour or 2 before the interview is supposed to happen. You'll just see an invite on your calendar and then. You're already committed to the interview.
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A third step that you can take is to focus on skill based assessment. Now that requires. Organizations, and this might be challenging for startup or accelerating growth organizations to really distill out what the job duties are. You're evaluating how they perform, not how they can pass their test. So if you have a well defined set of roles and responsibilities or tasks and responsibilities, assess based on their ability to meet the task or execute that task.
One of the things that you should be looking at is outcomes based hiring. What is the desired outcome that you're looking to achieve? And then who are the candidates that have done this throughout their career that you can talk to that will be a better predictor of future success?
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A fourth thing that you should consider, and this might be tricky depending on what stage you're at as an organization and even how big you are, but as soon as you can, you should be incorporating a diverse hiring panel.
So we've already talked about how the world of sales from a B2B tech perspective in the U. S. is largely 1 dimensional. So if you want to buck the trend. And you want to get access to a much broader pool of candidates, you have to look at embedding diversity and diversity into your hiring panels so that you're looking at mitigating or reducing the individual biases that might exist.
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One of the key steps in hiring effectively, especially in sales is to remove bias throughout the process. This isn't purely a fairness issue. It's a business imperative if you're faced with the challenge of not having enough candidates, you can't find enough good people.
You might want to first look at your internal process. And see how many candidates are coming into pipeline and how many are actually making it to an interview. If you have a lot of candidates coming into your pipeline, but not many are making it into an interview, there may be a bias issue. That's a play that needs to be mitigated.
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The alternative is do the same old continue to struggle finding candidates and continue to have a scenario where you're constantly churning through people because there isn't a systematized way to get them identified and then hired
