The Pros and Cons of Blind Hiring Sales Reps [Infographic]

Blind hiring is making headlines these days as a tool to fight bias and increase diversity while simultaneously finding the best candidates. So what exactly is blind hiring and how does it work for hiring sales professionals?

Here are three ways to conduct blind for sales reps and their pros and cons.

How to Blind Hire Salespeople

1) Blind candidate profiles and resumes

Blind candidates profiles and resumes can be created by removing identifying information such as names and photos. Anonymizing profiles allows you to more objectively evaluate a sales rep’s skills and potential to succeed free from unconscious biases about race, gender, and other characteristics that aren't related to sales success.

However, unless you use a product that’s dedicated to anonymizing profiles and resumes, it's difficult or even impossible to do on your own. Plus, it can be hard to overcome our need to know what a candidate looks like before moving forward with them.

2) Blind sales tests

When hiring sales reps, an example of a blind test would be a sample cold prospecting email. Because personality plays such an important role in sales compared to other professions, other ways to conduct blind tests to get sales reps to complete a personality assessment and culture fit questionnaire.

The most common job-related test for sales is a sample qualification call or sales demo. How useful it is to anonymize sales reps’ voices in the first place when a large part of many sales roles is talking to prospects and customers, creating rapport, and building relationships?

3) Blind interviews

A blind interview for sales reps would look like a written Q&A that’s either a take-home assignment or conducted in real time over chat.

However, hiring a sales rep often includes a phone screen. It’s extremely difficult to anonymize a voice over a phone call let alone during an in-person interview. Again, how useful it is to conduct anonymous interviews in the first place with all the in-person networking, presentations, and customer visits that sales reps typically do?

The Takeaways

Data suggests that blind hiring increases the diversity of the candidate pool by creating a more objective playing field for candidates who wouldn’t have made it to the interview stage otherwise.

Currently, tools for anonymizing profiles and resumes to get high quality sales reps into the top of your candidate pipeline exist, but whether blind demo-ing and blind interviewing will prove to be useful for hiring sales reps remain to be seen.

Interested in blind hiring to find sales reps who are the right fit for your role, team, and company culture? Use Ideal.com to automate candidate screening while duplicating your top sales performers.