At Caliper, our scientists have done extensive research on the traits that differentiate star college and professional athletes, and we believe these traits also apply to success in the sales field. By taking a closer look at the 6 personality traits of mental toughness, you can start to see how cultivating these traits in your salespeople can help you build a more effective, high-performing team with demonstrable improvements to revenue.

Level-headedness

Our scientists define level-headedness as the ability to stay composed in challenging interpersonal situations. In the context of the sales profession, that means dealing with difficult sales, indecisive prospects, competition from other organizations, etc.

Sales professionals who exhibit mental toughness are able to take these agitators and deal with them in a calm, composed manner. They have a good handle on their emotions and have the ability to express them at the appropriate times in the appropriate ways. Such behavior facilitates more productive conversations, even-keeled relationships with prospects and clients, and proper responses with their teammates.

Where it’s critical

The sales profession is full of challenging moments, whether they be from transactions, contract agreements, competition, or relationship management. An important part of making the sale is to manage your emotions properly. Things can get heated, discouraging, or even exciting, but you can’t always prepare for what’s going to hit you next. Level-headedness is a significant driver of performance in competencies focused on decision making, conflict management, and composure and resiliency — all of which you’ll encounter frequently in the sales field.

How familiar are you with #MentalToughness? @CaliperCorp is taking a deeper dive in this 3-part series:
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Stress-tolerance

Our scientists define stress-tolerance as the ability to remain resolute under stress. Sales is a stressful field. There are targets, high rejection rates, persistent negativity, and, usually, money at stake. In a smaller company, a lot of the weight of the business rests on the shoulders of salespeople. Additionally, the work hours are often unstructured or erratic — things can stop or go on a dime. Those sales professionals who have mental toughness know how to manage the volatile nature of the job and keep the stress from overwhelming them.

How to Manage Stress

Stress can make or break a deal. It can cause tunnel vision, making obstacles seem catastrophic. It leads to frustration and causes employees to feel discouraged and disengaged. It can scramble their communication skills, turning small misunderstandings into irreconcilable differences. So how does someone with mental toughness manage their stress?

• When they feel overwhelmed, they take a moment to examine the core issue. They may ask themselves, ‘What are the goals I’m trying to accomplish, what are the roadblocks, and how can I address them in a productive way?’ These individuals are able to identify the negative and frame it as an opportunity to achieve something positive.
• They set the tone. Stress often begets stress. By managing their own stressors and remaining strong and composed, their prospects and team members are likely to mirror their emotions back to them. By staying calm, they encourage everyone else to remain calm, too. This keeps stress from spiraling out of control and keeps everyone communicating effectively so things don’t go off the rails.
• They look for new opportunities that recurring issues reveal. What did they learn from this stressful period, and how can they apply their problem-solving skills to future issues? Everything is a learning opportunity and a mechanism for productivity improvements.

Feeling stressed out at work? @CaliperCorp is taking a deeper dive into the way stress management plays a part in #MentalToughness.
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Often stress management and level-headedness work together. Sales professionals with mental toughness are able to manage their stress levels because they are able to keep their emotions in check and  work through both with a cool, calm demeanor to maintain their vision of the bigger picture and the situation at hand.

The next post in this series covers how resilience and persistence fit into mental toughness and how they apply to the workplace. You can read that here. To see how Caliper can help you build stronger teams by finding candidates with the right personality traits, reach out to our experts today and get started.

Defining Behavioral Questions

Behavioral questions are a valuable tool to gauge a candidate’s future performance. Rather than hard skill sets — which can be trained — behavior is an innate quality that goes beyond ability and into potential. Questions that isolate past behavior, like how they handled a stressful situation, rebounded from a lost sale, or dealt with a difficult client, are a good insight into how your candidate can process and work through challenging scenarios. Behavioral questions that pinpoint situations similar to ones they can expect in the role for which they’re interviewing will give you a good idea of how they would handle conflict as it arises in this position. To do this, ask questions that gauge:

• How they would implement their knowledge to solve problems
• How their ability helps them navigate difficult situations
• How their skills allow them to be agile in uncommon scenarios
• How their temperament guides their decision-making

Why Behavioral Questions Are Important

The thing about asking candidates questions about their skills, experience, and education is that you already have their resume in front of you. Most of what you want to know has already been recorded for you. Behavioral questions help you target how your candidate might handle day-to-day workload and challenges, navigate relationships, and learn from mistakes. Rather than asking questions about projects that were successful or what their strengths are, dig deeper to understand how those things help them to determine what comes after success. What do they do once they’ve discovered a good workflow or process? Do they teach it to their colleagues? Perhaps they can tell you about their weaknesses or a project they struggled with and what they learned from it. How did it affect their work after that? Behavioral questions allow you to get a better understanding of their personalities to see how skill affects the way they perform their job and how they work with others.

Resumes can only tell you so much about a candidate. @CaliperCorp demonstrates why behavioral interview questions are crucial during #hiring:
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Most importantly, behavioral questions help you move beyond demeanor. It’s easy to be charmed by a candidate who is confident and can articulately speak to their strengths and the expectations of the role. Asking them questions about their past behaviors, however, allows you to get a better understanding of how they’ll behave in similar future scenarios. You can uncover patterns of friction or peacemaking with coworkers, frustration or temperance with clients, and see how they apply what they learn along the way. Behavioral questions help the interviewer see beyond an impressive demeanor and get to what really matters.

Get the Most Out of Your Interviews

Listen Well

The first thing your interviewers should be doing is listening. Steering the conversation is important, but talking too much means you aren’t getting the information you need to best evaluate your candidates. Listen intently—and take notes. You’ll likely be seeing many candidates in a day over a period of several days. In order to best remember answers from candidate to candidate, take note of what they say and your thoughts about the specifics of their responses. The more time that passes, the less accurately you can compare answers and what you thought of them. Revisit your notes and consider: Did they answer with specific examples? Did the answer relate well to the question? Were their answers thorough and thoughtful?

Compare to a Personality Assessment

Don’t rely solely on the interview to gauge your candidate’s behavior. Adding a scientifically-back personality assessment will paint a more detailed picture of your candidate’s potential. The Caliper Profile is validated against calibrated job models to match specific traits to necessary job functions. Using assessments such as this gives you reliable, qualitative data against which you can compare your interview notes to how they answer questions when no one else is in the room. Personality assessments are a great tool to dive more in-depth into your candidates’ behaviors and motivations.

Did you know? Only 1 in 5 hires turn out successfully. @CaliperCorp lays out why you should be asking behavioral questions during your #interviews:
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Speak With References

Don’t discount references. Take the opportunity to speak with former supervisors and coworkers to get a feel for what the candidate is like to work with. Instead of asking questions like, “Are they capable?” and “Would you hire them again?” inquire about what they were like to work with, how they managed their projects, and what their team dynamic was like. Pinpoint their working style and office interactions over whether or not they were competent. References are a unique opportunity to see inside the office and get a feel for what your candidate will actually be like as an employee.

Weigh All Aspects Equally

Understand that no one aspect of the interview process can give you a clear-cut answer as to whether or not to hire a candidate. There’s no magic solution. But, by using all the tools at your disposal, you can start to paint a clearer, more well-rounded picture of each candidate. Take your interview notes, personality assessment, and reference feedback and put them together for a holistic view of your candidate as a potential employee. You shouldn’t totally discount your gut feeling, but these three aspects of your interview process should back up that feeling. If they don’t align, you can look to the data you’ve compiled from multiple sources to see why things may be amiss.

For more information on The Caliper Profile and how Caliper can help you fine-tune your interview process and select the best possible candidates, reach out to our experts today to get started.

At Caliper, we feel that an individual’s potential speaks louder than their past experience. Our late founder, Dr. Herb Greenberg, always used to say, “10 years of experience could just be 1 year of bad experience repeated 10 times.”

Encourage Candidates to Lean Into Their Personality

There’s no such thing as a right or wrong personality. There’s a job for everyone — you simply have to find the roles that provide your candidates with the things that interest and motivate them. The more a candidate understands their own strengths and weaknesses, the things that drive them, and the things they dislike, the more likely they are to target jobs that feed what makes them happy. It helps their managers manage them better and coworkers to understand them more.

What’s In a “Type”

Most people fall into certain categories that have common traits and shared strengths and weakness. Most commonly known are the Meyers-Briggs personality types, which suggest that different individual traits are, in fact, part of an orderly and consistent spectrum of methods people use to perceive data and draw conclusions. Similar constructions have been made using the same basic psychological principles, and here at Caliper, we’ve spent decades studying and perfecting our personality assessment specifically for the workplace.

Think you know how to find the right person for the job? Think again. The best measure of success is through @CaliperCorp’s #personalityassessment
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By understanding the different types of personalities or dominant traits, management and HR teams are afforded a more thorough understanding of how a candidate might think, behave, the factors that motivate them, and the factors that derail them. When you understand how personality affects learning, behavior, and production, you can identify roles that work with those personality traits and build out a development plan that compliments a candidate’s style and preferences.

For example, a few personality traits that are measured by the Caliper Profile which we have found to contribute to sales success include:

Ego-Drive: A person with a high ego-drive is motivated by the ability to persuade others. For a salesperson, that means they only feel good when they make a sale, so they’ll do whatever it takes not to lose. They’re driven by the desire to feed their ego.

Empathy: An empathetic person considers how the things they say and do affect others. A salesperson with strong empathy will pay attention to the reactions of their prospects and adjust their tactics based on response. They are constantly taking the temperature of the conversation and will pivot as soon as they feel something is amiss.

Urgency: Urgency means that a person feels compelled to complete a task quickly and efficiently. For salespeople, that means proactively setting up calls, following up promptly, setting hard timelines, and consistently pushing the conversation forward.

Based on our research around sales success, we find that candidates that possess these traits are most likely to succeed and enjoy a sales role. However, it’s also important to look at the way their unique individual traits come together to shape a personality. Making an assumption based on a single trait won’t give you the big picture. Perhaps a candidate does exhibit the traits above, but they are also introverted, reserved, and cautious. They may be driven by success and work quickly to meet their goals, but they probably won’t enjoy being on the phone all day every day trying to make a sale. If your candidate suppresses this more reserved side of their personality, they’re placing themselves in the running for a job they won’t like, which could impact their success in the role as well as their engagement with it. It’s important to be open and honest about all facets of their personality.

The Power of Potential

At Caliper, our belief is that once you understand an individual’s motivations, training can come later. Work should be stimulating, engaging, and interesting. Today’s workforce is motivated to find a job that isn’t just a paycheck, and the first step is knowing how to meet their values.

It’s not about the resume, it’s about the personality. @CaliperCorp discusses why #personalityassessment is the key to finding the right fit for the job:
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Our assessment was specifically developed to gauge who a candidate is, not what they’ve done in the past, as well as what motivates them today. They may have been a computer programmer in the past, but if it bores them now, you shouldn’t put them in that role. Find what sparks their interest, and place them there. If they’re actively interested, they’ll learn quickly. And when an employee is engaged, motivated, and inspired — and their personality is aligned with the role — the entire production cycle goes up. A happier employee is a more productive employee.

Asking the Right Questions

So, how do you translate personality from an assessment to an interview? If you want to get to the bottom of what motivates a candidate, ask questions about how they handled adversity, recovered from a mistake, or when they were really proud of something. What projects have they worked on that got them excited, and why? When you speak to their references, don’t just ask if they were good at their job, ask what they were like, how they got along with their colleagues, and what kind of attitude they had. Focus on their nature, not on the things that can be coached later.

A powerful by-product of focusing on personality is that it’s the great leveler. There’s no right or wrong, pass or fail, there’s just potential. There’s no discounting based on race, gender, socio-economic status, physical abilities, or sexual preference. Everyone is of value and has something to contribute. Dr. Herb Greenberg struggled to find work early in his career due to his blindness. To use his words, forget the disability. Grab the ability, and ride it to death.

For almost 60 years, the Caliper Profile has helped companies predict a candidate’s potential for success in a particular job regardless of the candidate’s gender, ethnicity, age, or other factors that may bias a hiring decision. And when measured against a validated job model, the assessment data can predict how the individual will respond when faced with challenges at work and how successful the individual will be in the role. Assessments help to minimize unconscious bias by providing objective data to use when evaluating a candidate.

Are your candidates too worried about 'passing' your #PersonalityAssessments? @CaliperCorp says honesty is the best policy and shows you what happens when you try and guess what the hiring manager wants:
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Assessments are a valuable tool, and while they shouldn’t be taken lightly, it’s important for your candidates to understand that they’re nothing to panic over. Often considered a tool for the employer, assessments are actually a valuable part of the process for the candidate, too. When both sides of the table approach the assessment with the same goal — a successful hire and a good culture fit — everyone wins. Some candidates may believe that trying to “pass” the assessment will help them land the job. But there is no pass/fail in assessing personalities, and trying to game the system doesn’t benefit either party involved. Here’s how candidates and employers should each approach personality assessments so that new hires don’t end up in a job where they can’t thrive:

The Employer Approach

With Caliper’s 52 validated job models, there’s a job for everyone. When interviewing candidates for a specific role, it’s important to review their assessment as it compares to the responsibilities and expectations for the role. Review the specific traits, behaviors, and competencies required of the job against those exhibited in the candidate’s results, so that you understand their strengths and areas for development before stepping into the room with them. Does the candidate have the key ingredients needed for success?

As you bring your interview questions into focus, don’t just consider the specific task-based needs for the job. Also ask targeted, behavioral-based questions that can isolate key personality attributes and explore how the individual may have developed other skills in order to adapt to inherent weaknesses. Listen to the candidate’s responses and compare them to the results of the Caliper Profile. Candidates who tried to answer based on what they think hiring managers want to hear, rather than their actual answers, will show themselves immediately. Inconsistencies in the assessment indicate someone who might not be the right fit for this role.

The Candidate Approach

Honesty is the best policy. No one wants to be stuck in a job they don’t want or enjoy. Workplace personality assessments are just as much for the candidate to understand how they fit into a role as it is for the employer. Before administering your assessment, it’s good practice to make it clear to your candidates that this isn’t something they need to go into with worry, that it’s in their best interest to be open and honest. And it’s also just one added data point in the hiring process.

For candidates to be fully transparent and honest is just as important for their own career goals as it is for your hiring needs. Attempting to answer the assessment by trying to fit themselves into a mold they believe exists for the role will likely mean they’re placed into a role that isn’t right for them. They could then have trouble getting up to speed, advancing through the company, and even enjoying their work. Candidates who answer to the role, as opposed to themselves, will wind up leaving the company after a short stint, back on the job market, or they’ll be stuck in a frustrating position with no exit strategy.

The candidate in the flow chart who approached the assessment with honesty experiences higher job satisfaction, excels in their role and professional development, is upwardly mobile within the company, and reaches benchmarks in their career goals in a timely fashion. The employer enjoys high productivity, efficiency, and loyalty from the employee. Conversely, the candidate who answered according to how they perceived the hiring manager wanted them to, experiences stagnation, displacement, dissatisfaction, and ultimately exits the company. The employer experiences lost productivity and will lose money searching for a replacement. When you communicate clearly to candidates that personality assessments are just as much a tool for themselves as it is a tool for the hiring manager, everyone benefits in both the long and short term.

To learn more about how the Caliper Profile can improve your hiring process, reach out to our experts today to get started!

These five traits of sales effectiveness separate the extraordinary salespeople from the rest.

Self Motivated

Top salespeople are continually learning and improving their processes to keep up with their customers and competition. They take time to understand the product, the company, and customers. With this new-found knowledge, they create a customer focused action plan. Want sales to grow? You have to stay ahead of the game, and top sales performers know this and are willing to put in the extra work to make it happen.

Did you know?

More than half of prospects want to see how the product works on the first call.

Remarkable salespeople have the focus and determination to strive for the best and more. They push past the distractions and set individual goals to be a top producer. They’re armed with a strategic action plan that guides them to reach goals and not let setbacks stand in their way.

Personable

Nobody likes to talk to someone who can’t hold a conversation or comes off cold. Every salesperson who has closed multiple deals and has a long list of clients has one thing in common – they’re personable. Customers are more attracted and likely to work with your company when your sales rep has a heightened level of emotional intelligence and can use it to create a connection with customers.

Your sales reps should be able to spark a connection and build a foundation between the customer and themselves. By doing this, your customers will feel valued and appreciated, and in the long run, will want to continue doing business with you. A benefit that comes with this is word of mouth referrals. Customers who have an incredible experience with their sales reps are likely to tell others, which can bring in more sales opportunities for your company.

Passionate & Optimistic

Top salespeople are typically positive and optimistic. They have a strong passion for the company and the products they sell. They typically have an upbeat outlook and tend to have a good sense of humor and overall fun aspect about them. While they still have those grounded traits, they make sure customers love working with your company. A top salesperson demonstrates passion every day, and it is clear that they believe in their product and their organization. This confidence and passion give customers a sense of comfort. They see their sales rep as authentic and trust what the rep is telling them.

Fast Fact:

“Less than 10 percent of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement and being frequently overwhelmed with sadness.”

Optimism plays a huge part when you separate the average salesperson and the top performer. When your sales rep uses an optimistic approach, they know what they can achieve and they don’t allow one bad day or experience to tarnish their positivity or outlook on their overall goals. They focus on what they can control and take those bad experiences as learning opportunities to do better.

Resilient

Those top performers know the feeling of being told “no” over and over, but they also know how to bounce back fast and be persistent. They know how to get the job done and keep their focus. Bouncing back can tell you a lot about a salesperson’s attitude and personality if they can jump back into the game after being discouraged. They’re likely able to take constructive feedback well and are willing to put in the hard work.

Top performers don’t get discouraged when their numbers are lower than usual but instead look for opportunities. Those extraordinary salespeople have the tenacity to push through hardships and conquer any obstacles that might get in their way.

Problem Solver

The desire to create an ultimate experience for customers is a necessary quality for sales effectiveness. A great salesperson will look for new ways to solve customers’ needs, financially and emotionally. They are able to offer the right solutions based on customer needs and present it in a way that feels genuine and empathetic. By putting your customers’ needs first your organization is seen as capable and trustworthy.

Want to learn which core competencies your sales professionals possess? Get to know them with the Caliper Profile and see how to tap into their potential. To get started, reach out to our experts today.

Why Personality Assessments are Critical

Cognitive ability tests can predict general ability to perform a job. However, they do not predict the personality dimensions, workstyles and motivators which determine if applicants will actually do the job successfully. Personality assessments help us understand how individuals perceive, interpret, respond to, and learn from work situations. It is critical in a wide range of contexts such as communication, decision making, problem solving, and time management.

Personality assessments do the following things:

1. Provide Data-Driven Results

Personality assessments provide insights regarding how candidates interact in the workplace and also predict job performance and fit with the company’s culture. This data also helps improve the team’s overall productivity and success.

Unlike face-to-face interviews, personality assessments enable a company to objectively assess an individual and can help reduce unconscious bias within the selection process.

2. Improve Selection Process

When evaluating a candidate’s fit, personality assessments can substantially improve the selection process and predict a person’s potential. This data helps drive a more informed decision. It also informs how the individual can be onboarded, managed, coached, and professionally developed throughout their career.

3. Increase Employee Retention

Over 70% of candidates expect to leave a company within two years of getting hired. So while finding the right candidates is crucial for any company, having the ability to keep them is just as important.

Herb Greenberg, PhD., founder of Caliper, would reinforce time and time again that if a person’s personality fit with the requirements of the job, the employee would enjoy their job more, which then would translate to better performance and longer retention in their role, and with the company.

Personality assessments allow companies to discover whether a candidate is likely to stay and thrive in the role they were hired for. In the current economic environment, acquiring and retaining top talent is a competitive advantage. Personality assessments help companies in the war for talent and often reduce the costs of turnover and hiring. The assessments will assist companies in hiring the right person, for the right role, the first time around.

Transform how your organization selects and develops talent with The Caliper Profile.

Your next personality assessment must provide valuable insights into the qualities that signify sales effectiveness, and those insights can create a brighter path for your organization. However, if personality assessments aren’t constructed well and scientifically-validated with real data, you could end up wasting time and resources on something that doesn’t work. Consider this infographic when you are choosing your next personality assessment:

When we talk about personality-based employment assessments, the message is often some variation of: Using a valid pre-employment assessment can help you dig deeper than resumes and interviews and discover which applicant has the intrinsic strengths and motivations to succeed in the role. According to Psychology Today, about 80% of Fortune 500 companies use personality tests to assess potential candidates during the hiring process. Many companies rely on personality tools to assist in making better hiring and developmental decisions.

That’s all true. But what happens when the results of the pre-employment assessment aren’t what you wanted to see? That is, what if your favorite candidate does not show the intrinsic motivations for the role?

Understand What You Need, Not What You Want

Finding the best candidate can be a very lengthy process, but taking the time to find the right candidate for the job is worthwhile and beneficial for your company in the long run.

Think of it like this. After screening dozens of applicants, you’re down to your final two. Before you select one, you present your candidates with a personality assessment to complete. First, there is Emily.  During the interview stages of the hiring process, every time she was presented a question, she quickly replied with a well-crafted answer. You were impressed in her responses and the conversation continued to develop into a harmonious exchange. And then there is your second candidate, Sara. She looked great on paper, but during the interview, she stumbled around her words, trying to grasp and craft clear answers. You felt as if she wasn’t giving you anything. In the back of your mind, you thought she could do it, but she didn’t convince you.

You’ve received the results and suddenly noticed that Sara’s assessment results were much better suited to the job opening than Emily’s. Of course, there are roles that you may want to judge from the beginning of the hiring process, but at the end of the day, you want to find the most qualified candidate for the job.

Check out how the Caliper Profile uses scientifically-backed data and assessments to transform how companies hire talent.

Jessica Principale, Talent Management Consultant with Caliper, often finds herself advising clients on job applicants whose assessment results do not line up well with the position the client is trying to fill. “Those conversations can be challenging,” Jessica says. “I try to dig deeper into why they feel so strongly about the candidate. You have to relate to what they see in the results, but then use the instrument to uncover the behavioral tendencies that lie below the surface. Once I link the data to the day-to-day responsibilities of the job, most hiring managers will understand my perspective.”

To find your best candidates, it is important to understand that to get what you want, you have to know what you want. 75% of employers have hired the wrong person. From the beginning, setting clear expectations of the skills you need throughout the role can help better identify important behavioral traits and skills through an assessment.

But of course, job candidates are more than the results of a personality assessment. They are real people, and sometimes real people click with each other. Caliper would never say to a client, don’t hire this person. Even the best personality assessment is only part of the story. Still, it’s critical to take a long view.

Identifying Behavioral Competencies

There are many elements that are involved in making a job role attractive to a candidate. At the beginning and end of the process, hiring managers want to make sure that they are providing the best experience for their candidates through an engaging, impactful, personal connection. But is that truly enough?

According to Jessica, personally connecting with a job applicant and valuing their experiences can be important components of the hiring decision, but those elements do not necessarily indicate how the candidate would handle the unique responsibilities of the role over time. “At that point, I try to refocus the conversation on job tasks and relate them to the applicant’s intrinsic behavioral competencies,” Jessica adds.

Behavioral competencies emerge when personality attributes intersect with job responsibilities and on- the-key job performance, and they can be identified ahead of time through the use of a scientifically validated pre-employment assessment like the Caliper Profile. Whether or not an applicant’s assessment results show the key behavioral competencies associated with a certain job, Caliper wants its clients to get the most out of their new hires, even if hires don’t necessarily possess a high skill level at the beginning of their new role. You want to ensure that clients have an assessment that can support hiring and individual employee development.

“If the client decides to hire an applicant with results that do not line up well with the job, I try to ensure they are prepared for what they are getting,” Jessica says. “We talk in depth about the coaching areas, and I work with hiring managers to develop onboarding action plans. If issues do arise, they can always reach out to me, and we’ll brainstorm alternatives.”

It’s always better to be prepared for the unexpected, instead of struggling to find solutions to fix problems and gaps in the end.

What does Jessica say is most important in getting past the rough patches? “Communication and follow-up.” Good advice for anything in life, really.

Whether you need to fill a new position, find the right employees or improve talent gaps in your workforce, Caliper offers any organization, big or small, the right assessments to measure job performance. Contact us today to learn more about how you can transform your organization.