The phrase ‘hire for behaviour, train for skills and knowledge’ is an increasingly popular concept amongst recruiters, rooted in the fact that it’s important to employ people who are the right fit for your business.
In today’s complex and fast-changing work environment, hiring the right candidate means understanding more than just skills and experience. It’s also about how someone thinks, communicates, adapts, and contributes to a team. Using behavioural insights predicts how candidates are likely to behave in the workplace, helping you make better, more informed hiring decisions.
In selling specifically, behaviours like: curiosity, empathy, active listening, relationship building, tenacity, resilience, adaptability, problem solving, motivation and drive, are critical behaviour for success and profiling results across four orientations or styles will give you real insight.
To add further credence to the concept, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (C.I.P.D.) recommends Behavioural Profiling as one of three key elements in their Profession Map® alongside specialist and core knowledge.
A 2-way process & fit
It’s a 2-way process, as for employers, behavioural profiling offers a comprehensive understanding of candidates beyond their qualifications and experience. In contrast, for candidates, it provides an opportunity to find roles that align with their strengths and working styles, in turn enhancing employee satisfaction.
Getting it right first time
The cost of a poor hiring decision has been calculated as near 300% of salary and with the advent of the Employment Rights Bill due in 2026, employees will have much earlier rights. For example, the ability to claim unfair dismissal from Day One as compared to the current two years qualification period. “Hire slow and Fire fast” has never been truer in a recruitment context.
Knowledge and skills
Processes are becoming more automated everywhere we look, with machines able to replicate certain hard skills and optimise manual processes, the role of soft skills becomes ever more vital and with many organisations using the same new technology, it’s a team’s judgement, creativity, and innovation that will help to maintain an edge over competition and adapt to new ways of working. With increasingly flexible working arrangements (e.g. working remotely, hybrid, or at different times) and more diverse staffing, strong collaborative and communication skills are more crucial than ever to ensure a team’s success. Skills can easily and more effectively be trained on the job for your sales environment, in workshops, through coaching, and on manager ride-alongs. Knowledge is everywhere and so easily accessible, especially with the growth of AI.
Predicting future performance
Past behaviour is a strong indicator of future behaviour. Behavioural profiling and interviews will help hiring managers understand how a candidate has handled challenges, worked under pressure, and collaborated with others in the past, providing valuable insights into their potential performance in the new role using questioning techniques like STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Results.
Assessing cultural fit
Profiling tools like Life Orientations (LIFO®) offer Organisational Culture Surveys to assess and define a culture against which a candidate’s profile can be matched. A good fit can improve employee satisfaction and reduce turnover.
Team fit & unconscious bias
Similarly, using profiling surveys, you can assess a team’s collective profile and see where behavioural gaps or excesses may exist and strengthen the team’s dynamics by the appointment of a best fit candidate. Profiling also avoids unconscious bias in recruiting as we all, if left alone, have a bias to appointing people in our own self-image. “We all like people like us” in psychology terms is called “affinity bias”.
The ideal sales profile
Some profiling tools, like Life Orientations™ (LIFO®), have plotted an ideal profile for a particular role in sales or account management. From transactional style New Business sellers to Consultative Business Developers, from Inside Sales teams to Account Managers, the predicted behavioural preferences change, so matching a candidate is easier. Additionally, you can create your own ideal profile using descriptors of each of the four orientations and then measure this against your top performers. Salespeople can often be under real stress and pressure if results aren’t going their way or at month or year end, so knowing how people behave under stress (unfavourable conditions), as opposed to normal day to day (favourable conditions), is another hugely helpful insight to discover before selection, rather than finding such traits post-employment.
In Summary
Whilst knowledge and skills are important in early stages of recruiting, understanding people’s behaviour massively mitigates hiring risks.
A simple behavioural profile used at shortlist stage can unlock huge insights on a candidate to assess cultural and team fit as well as avoid unconscious bias.
Salespeople are likely to talk a great talk at interview, so you need deeper insights and to scrape beneath the veneer!
Interested in hearing more on this? Watch Mark Erskine’s webinar here.
Written by Mark Erskine
Mark Erskine is Director and Founder of Seller Performance and a highly experienced sales performance specialist, with over 35 years’ experience in business-to-business sales at corporate level. Mark is a Senior Master Trainer and Coach and UK Partner for Life Orientations (LIFO®) behavioural profiling, qualified business coach and mentor, trained facilitator and former Miller Heiman Independent Consultant.