Treat hiring as a working sample of the job. Ask the candidate to prospect, discover, take coaching, and try again. The strongest signal appears after feedback, in how quickly the candidate implements it.1 Build the process around behavior you can watch or ask the candidate to explain. That gives you a cleaner read on how the person will work once the conversation ends.
Define the profile
Start with the behaviors you need before you decide how to interview. Each trait on the profile should have a visible test somewhere in the process.
A team should define a characteristic before building the interview process around it.2 Begin with an Ideal Talent Profile that describes the attributes and skills you want to find.3 Review current hires to identify which attributes and skill sets drive success or failure across the team.4
Build the scorecard around prospecting discipline, objection recovery, coachability, research quality, communication clarity, and sustainable motivation.5 For each item, write what good behavior sounds like, what weak behavior sounds like, and where you will test it.
Ask yourself: which behavior must this person show before I can trust the rest of the interview? If you cannot answer that, keep working on the profile before opening the process.
Source and qualify
Make the way you find candidates resemble the work you need them to do. Candidate outreach can reveal how someone prepares, personalizes, and creates a reason for contact.
Apply the prospecting instructions you give the team to candidate sourcing.6 Treat this as a calibration exercise for the process, with the possibility that the outreach produces a hire.
Qualify and understand the candidate before you sell the company.7 On an outbound first call, treat recruiting as a sales call.8 Listen for whether the candidate can explain what they want, why this role fits, and what they have done that relates to the work.
Before the hiring manager interviews the candidate, collect information such as deal stage, deal size, and sales-cycle length.9 Use those details to decide which experience questions deserve time in the next conversation. When the candidate has limited selling history, keep the discussion focused on transferable behaviors you can test directly.
Screen for proof
Use the screen to move from claims to examples. A candidate who describes a process clearly gives you something to test in the work sample.
Prioritize proof that the candidate has already done the relevant task.10 Ask the candidate to explain how they booked a meeting, including the steps they took and any conversations that shaped the outcome.11
Ask, "What's your prospecting process? What's your approach to running a discovery call?"12 Follow up on vague answers until you can hear the sequence of actions, the judgment behind them, and the result they produced.
Do not reward a polished story by itself. Move on when the candidate can explain what they noticed, what they tried, and what they changed when the first approach did not work.
Run the work sample
Give the candidate enough context to make sensible choices. The exercise should test preparation and discovery without forcing the candidate to guess what they are selling.
Provide the company size, the personas in the room, the buyer, the problems, and a quick product primer.13 Then ask the candidate to run discovery while the interviewer acts as a buyer who arrived as an inbound lead.14 Treat the interview as a pseudo discovery call and evaluate how the candidate conducts discovery.15
Watch the questions closely. The candidate's role play should show whether they connect their questions and findings into a coherent view of the buyer's situation.16 Listen for a thread through the conversation, with each question informed by what came before it.
After the exercise, coach the candidate and run the exercise again. A brief live or written exercise followed by coaching and a retry can show how the candidate responds to feedback in real time; apply it consistently and score against criteria disclosed to candidates.17 Move on when you can describe the change you saw after coaching in concrete terms.
Make the decision and check references
Keep the decision easy to audit. Each interviewer should own a distinct signal, and the final discussion should bring those signals together without turning them into impressions.
Use separate interviews for prospecting, discovery, and process skills.18 When the candidate runs discovery on you and the company, use that conversation as a starting point for additional questions about the candidate's experience.19 Ask the candidate to sell you on why they are a good fit for the company.20
For references, make sure the person conducting the check knows the tools and the target position.21 Ask for the situation, context, and tasks the applicant faced.22 Compare the answer with the behavior you saw in the work sample and the examples from the screen.
What not to do
These mistakes make the process look rigorous while removing the signals you need. Keep them out of the scorecard and the interview room.
- Do not use experience as an automatic gate. Seventy-four percent of companies are comfortable hiring SDRs with little to no work experience, and most new hires have less than twelve months of experience.23
- Keep experience in the score because it appears to play a role in SDR success.24
- Do not let a candidate skip company or role research before the interview.25
- Do not turn the product pitch into a presentation test only. Use it to see whether the candidate can ask good discovery questions.26
- Do not leave ownership vague. If there is no dedicated SDR manager, identify someone in sales or marketing with the experience, bandwidth, and appetite to screen, evaluate, and potentially source candidates.27
Before opening the role, turn each profile trait into a question, a work sample observation, or a reference prompt. Then run candidates through the same order and make the decision from behavior you observed, changes you saw after coaching, and proof the candidate can explain.