Sales hire scorecard

Purpose

Interviews for a sales seat often reward the candidate who worked for an admired company, rather than the one who built the kind of pipeline this seat needs. This skill makes the scorecard before the interviews begin, so the panel agrees on what matters, then scores each candidate on what they actually did.

When to use

• A sales, customer success, or other GTM seat is being hired.
• A panel disagrees about a candidate.
• A shortlist needs ranking on the same basis.

Route elsewhere when:

• The question is the pay plan for the seat. Use gtm-compensation.
• The question is the team's capacity plan. Use gtm-planning-org-design.

Inputs

• The role, the job description, the target start date, and the panel.
• The numbers behind the seat: average deal size, sales cycle, buyer, the source of pipeline, product complexity, and whether this is new business or account growth. If unknown, ask for them before building. A scorecard built on a guess scores the wrong things.
• A past scorecard for a similar seat, if one exists, used only as a starting point.

Procedure

Build (once, before the first interview)

1. Write the seat motion in one line each: deal size, cycle length, buyer, pipeline source, complexity, and new versus existing business.
2. Choose six to eight criteria that a mismatch would make the hire fail. Drop anything a capable person learns in their first month.
3. Force-rank the criteria with no ties. The hiring manager decides the order. Spread 100 points across them in rank order. Mark up to two as must-haves. The team running the hire owns the weights.
4. Assign one primary question and one follow-up per criterion, and one interviewer who owns each. No criterion goes unasked, and none is asked three times.
5. Anchor the scoring. Define what a 1, 2, 3, and 4 look like for each criterion, using observable behavior.
6. Agree the scorecard with the whole panel before the first interview.

Score (after each interview)

7. Score each criterion 1 to 4 from the answer. Quote or summarize the evidence. Mark a criterion unobserved if the interview did not cover it.
8. Judge on what they did. Ask how they sold, to whom, and at what deal size, before asking where. A rep who sold into inbound demand for a well-known product and one who built pipeline for an unknown product have different skills, and the scorecard should show which one matches the seat.
9. Rank the candidates on weighted scores. Show the evidence beside each score.
10. End with one decision per candidate for the hiring manager: yes or no. The score informs the decision. It does not make it.

Trial mode (recommended for the first role)

Run the scorecard alongside the panel's normal process, without recording it in any system. At the end, compare who each process would have hired and why. Switch on recording only once the panel trusts the scores.

Output

• The seat motion, the criteria with weights, the must-haves, and the question and owner for each criterion.
• Per candidate: the score for each criterion with its evidence, the weighted total, and the yes or no for the hiring manager.
• A ranked summary across the shortlist.

Quality bar

The scorecard is agreed before the first interview. Each criterion has one owner and one question. Scores cite evidence. Candidates are judged on what they did, with where they worked as context only. Watch for criteria added after seeing candidates, scores given on impression, and a decision taken from the score alone.