Stop Hiring for Skills. Start Hiring for Sales DNA
There's a specific type of person who can sell and most job descriptions are designed to screen them out. You ask for 5+ years of experience, a degree, and a list of tools they've used. The person you actually need doesn't have all of that. They have something harder to teach: the instinct to find the opening in a conversation and push through it without being pushy.
Sales DNA is not about being loud or aggressive. It's about genuine curiosity combined with the ability to hold a position under pressure. A great sales hire is someone who asks a question and actually listens to the answer and then asks a sharper follow-up based on what they just heard. That's a skill you can test for in 20 minutes. Most hiring processes never go near it.
What we do when hiring for sales roles at Krijyo and for our clients: the first filter is a cold outreach task. We give candidates a fake company profile and a target persona and ask them to write a cold email. No instructions, no templates. What they send back tells us more than a resume ever could ,do they lead with themselves or with the prospect? Is the CTA clear? Does the subject line make you want to open it?
Skill tests like this add 2 hours to your hiring process and remove 80% of bad hires. The cost of a wrong sales hire is not just the salary, it's the pipeline damage, the deals they don't follow up on, the prospects they burn that you'll never get back.
Build your hiring filter around what the job actually demands. If you're building out a sales team and need help designing the process-sales@krijyo.com.