Being in a small business means having to wear a few hats, one of which is to screen and hire the right people for the job. Since I’m mainly a technical person, the interviewees I’ve had to handle are mostly for Developer roles. Its pretty easy to gauge on a technical skill level what type of developer a person is but its not always fool-proof as we’ve encountered some bad hires one to two months down a project.  Especially in small businesses, bad hires are detrimental to the company’s cashflow and morale once people have to leave. Its also a huge waste of time to have to keep up the constant cycle of looking for the right person.

While I am currently more involved in the sales process, I haven’t conducted interviews for sales people before and so had to quickly do some research on the types of questions that can gauge a sales person’s abilities and personality. I would say the questions asked aren’t that much different from a developer’s role although it is probably more skewed towards personality, ethics and creativity at selling a product. Have prepared a quick guide for myself so let’s hope its useful to hire the right sales person for the company. Already have had some bad experiences with disastrous sale people so anything that can help avoid mistakes is a plus.

Some links that helped a lot in my research and preparing a hiring guide:

http://www.mediaselling.us/MSM_AppendixB-InterviewingGuide.htm

http://www.3r.ie/resources/sales_articles/hiring_sales_people.htm

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/care-feeding-sales-people

http://www.recruitersnetwork.com/articles/article.cfm?ID=1516

http://software.ericsink.com/bos/Closing_the_Gap_Part_1.html