As a business leader, you already know: Hiring is hard. A resume rarely gives you a good indication of a candidate’s skills. Interviews, meanwhile, are often laden with bias — which creates a negative experience for candidates and doesn’t help you hone in on the best talent.
Skills assessments have long been the gold standard for hiring best practices. Unlike resumes, skills assessments can provide a realistic work simulation by asking candidates to do tasks similar to those they’d really do on the job — like programming a small application, for example. Top companies like Google and Meta use job-relevant skills assessments as the first step in their hiring process for most of their engineering and other technical roles, sometimes even in place of a resume review.
But until recently, creating an assessment for non-technical roles that simulates tasks like a sales call or customer escalation was challenging. The best we could do was ask candidates to make a mock pitch to one of our sales leaders or a practice presentation to a panel. It was time-intensive to schedule and conduct the interviews — and grading candidates’ performance on those tasks in an automated way was even trickier.
Today, AI makes it totally possible to create realistic simulations of sales roles in your hiring process.
Related: How to Use AI to Streamline Your Recruitment Practices
Using AI to hire for sales roles
At my own company, we recently adopted an AI-powered strategy to hire for all of our Sales roles. We received hundreds of applicants for each of our open Account Executive roles — and instead of poring over each resume, we invited every candidate to take an automated skills assessment driven by realistic sales-role plays and interview questions with AI conversation simulation.
This new approach was initially met with some healthy skepticism from peers. Some recent studies suggest that candidates are concerned about the use of AI tools in hiring; others, however, indicate that candidates are open to AI tools as a way to boost fairness in hiring. We weren’t sure which sentiment would dominate among our candidates.
After rounds of hiring, we’ve found that our candidates love the new process. One applicant wrote to us after completing the assessment to say he was “blown away by the assessment process and the AI,” and another to say it was “one of the coolest experiences” they had during their job search. Overall, the candidates who have gone through this process rate it 4.3 out of 5 on user experience, 4.3 out of 5 on fairness and 4.5 out of 5 on job relevance.
After just three months with our new process, we saved our Sales team over 1,500 collective hours they would have spent conducting and prepping for interviews. This frees them up to focus on the work that makes the greatest impact: driving revenue.
How our process works
Here’s what our new hiring process for Account Executives on our Sales team looks like, from start to finish:
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We publish our job posting in our Applicant Tracking System (ATS), explaining what the hiring process will look like for the role, and recruiters outbound to high-potential candidates.
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Recruiters screen applicants in a short phone interview.
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Candidates who pass the initial screen are automatically sent a link from our ATS to complete a 15-minute assessment on their own time. In this AI-native assessment, candidates role-play job-relevant sales scenarios in a conversation simulation.
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During the assessment, the candidate engages in several job relevant scenarios. These might include making an outbound call to a cold prospect, drafting an email to book a meeting and speaking on a discovery call to qualify the opportunity.
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The assessment then automatically scores the candidate’s performance according to criteria that matter for each role.
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Our recruiting team then reviews the results from candidates who completed the assessments, diving deeper into the transcripts of a candidate’s interactions when needed. They then select candidates to advance to the next stage, prioritizing those with higher scores.
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We then have our sales team interview a much smaller pool of candidates to build on the role-plays they engaged in with the AI agent, ask follow-up questions and hone in on team and company fit.
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After this, we move to the offer stage for the best-qualified candidate.
Related: 13 Benefits of Using AI-Powered Applicant Tracking Systems
What we’ve learned about using AI to interview
While we were implementing and iterating on this new hiring strategy, we learned a few lessons that significantly improved the quality of the signal we were able to get from AI-powered interviews — as well as the candidate experience.
First, we learned that for AI-powered conversations to effectively identify candidates skilled at communicating with customers and prospects, the conversation needed to feel real. This required using an AI conversation agent specifically trained to recognize, for instance, when someone is pausing briefly in their speech versus waiting for a response so it could avoid interrupting its conversation partner.
Second, we found that the scoring mechanism for the AI needed to be calibrated to assess the specific skills that mattered for the roles we were hiring for. To do this, we tested the tool with our existing team of salespeople and used their feedback on their interview and results to refine our scoring criteria.
Solving for these allowed us to build a sales hiring process that realistically simulated the role-play interviews formerly carried out by our salespeople, but with drastically fewer resources and with even more consistency in scoring candidates’ performance.
The future of AI in hiring
Looking ahead, I predict that the use of an AI-enhanced hiring process like the one my company has adopted will become the norm rather than the exception. The ability of AI to realistically simulate a human conversation will only continue to improve as this technology advances, and the immense scalability of AI-powered hiring solutions will soon make them a business necessity — especially for companies that receive a high volume of job applications.
If they take a thoughtful approach, companies of any size have much to gain from integrating AI into their hiring strategy sooner than later.
Related: How Integrating AI Into Recruitment Can Benefit Companies Facing a Labor Crisis
