You will be able to write a hiring profile that names the skills and behaviours the role needs.
You have an open role and a deadline. HR asks for a job ad by Friday, so you open the last one the company used, change the date, and add "hungry", "self-starter" and "excellent communication skills". Two weeks later you have eighty applications, and you cannot tell from any of them who will actually sell.
The problem started before the ad. You did not yet know what you were looking for, so you asked for what everyone asks for, and got what everyone gets. This lesson is about the document that comes first: the hiring profile.
A hiring profile is a short description of what the person in this role will do each week, and which skills and behaviours they need to do it well. You and the other interviewers use it to make the decision. Candidates never see it, although the job ad is written from it later.
Begin with the week. What does someone in this seat spend their time on? For Wei Ming's open role, selling payroll software to SMEs, he listed it from his reps' calendars: about a third of the week finding new prospects by phone, email and LinkedIn, a third running discovery meetings and demos with business owners and HR managers. The last third went on proposals, follow-up calls and the first months of each new client's account.
That list already rules things out. Someone who has only ever handled inbound enquiries will struggle with a third of the week spent prospecting. Someone who loves the chase but dislikes paperwork will find the proposal work hard. Two roles with the same title, such as "account executive", can involve completely different weeks, so the title on its own tells you almost nothing.
Next, look at the people who already do the job. Take your strongest performers and your weakest, and ask what they do differently. Ignore their CVs. Where they studied and how many years they have sold tell you little, while what they do in an ordinary week tells you a great deal.
Wei Ming compared Aisha, his top seller, with a rep who had left after missing target for three quarters, and found that the gap between them was mostly habit. Aisha booked her prospecting time every morning and kept it even in busy weeks. She asked a second and third question in discovery before talking about the product. After a lost deal she called the buyer to ask why. The rep who left did most of his prospecting on Friday afternoons, presented early, and moved on from losses without asking anything.
Those are things you can look for. Persistence, curiosity and the habit of learning from a loss show up in how people describe their past work, and in how they behave in a role play.
Some things a new hire can learn in their first month. Product knowledge, your CRM, your pricing, your sales process and your industry's vocabulary all fall into this group. Module 3 covers how to teach them quickly.
Other things are much harder to build from scratch. Persistence after rejection, genuine curiosity about other people's problems, the discipline to do the dull activities every day, and coachability, meaning the ability to take feedback and change, are hard to teach to an adult who does not already have them.
So hire for the second group and train the first. A candidate with five years in your industry but no curiosity is often a worse bet than a candidate from a different industry who asks you three sharp questions in the first interview. If you need industry knowledge from day one, say so in the profile, but be honest with yourself about whether you do.
A profile full of words like "driven" and "strong communicator" cannot be tested, so interviewers fill the gap with gut feel. The final step is to turn each must-have into something you could see or hear.
Write each one as a behaviour and a test. "Persistence" becomes "keeps going after rejection; tested by asking about a time they lost a deal they expected to win, and by pushing back twice in the role play". "Curiosity" becomes "asks follow-up questions before offering a solution; tested by counting the questions they ask in the role play before mentioning the product". "Coachability" becomes "uses feedback straight away; tested by giving one piece of feedback halfway through the role play and watching what changes".
Wei Ming ended up with five must-haves: prospecting discipline, curiosity in discovery, persistence after a loss, clear written follow-up, and coachability. Each had a line saying how he would test it. Lessons 2.2 and 2.3 build the interview questions and the role play that do the testing.
Write must-haves that relate to the job and nothing else. Age, race, religion, gender, marital status, family responsibilities and nationality have no place in a hiring profile or a job ad unless a genuine requirement of the job makes them relevant, and that is rare in sales. Phrases like "young and energetic" or "suits a fresh graduate" exclude people for reasons unrelated to the work.
In Singapore, the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices, known as TAFEP, publishes the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices, and the Ministry of Manpower sets out employers' obligations on its website. Singapore has also passed a Workplace Fairness Act. Check with your HR team, TAFEP and MOM which of these rules apply to your company and what they require when you advertise, interview and select. Lesson 2.4, Run a mock hiring round, includes a check against them.
In the activity below you will write a one-page profile for your own open role or the role you expect to hire for next. Keep it to five must-haves, so every one of them gets tested properly.
Write a one-page hiring profile with five must-have behaviours and how you will test each one.
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