u/Frostedlogic4444

I'll be honest. I used to think sales aptitude tests were kind of a gimmick. Figured a good interviewer could read a candidate just as well, and adding a test to the process just slowed things down and annoyed people who had options.

Then we had a brutal stretch of bad hires. Three reps in eight months who interviewed confidently, had decent numbers on paper, and completely fell apart once they were carrying a real quota. Pipeline bloat, missed targets, and one situation that got uncomfortable with a client.

The cost wasn't just financial; it tanked team morale and set our ramp timeline back by a quarter.

We finally caved and added a sales aptitude assessment to the process. Didn't expect much. What surprised me was how quickly it surfaced things that interviews consistently missed: coachability, resilience under rejection, and whether someone was actually motivated by the work or just comfortable talking about it.

Hasn't been a silver bullet. We still have the occasional miss. But the signal-to-noise ratio in our pipeline improved a lot, and our last four hires have all hit ramp targets.

Curious where others land on this. Still skeptical? Already converted? And if you're using assessments, what actually made the difference in how you implemented them?

Unpopular opinion, maybe, but we actually stopped using personality assessments for hiring, and it was one of the better decisions we made.

We were running candidates through a full suite of cognitive, behavioral, and other work — and after about 18 months, we noticed the data wasn't really doing what we thought it was. High scorers were still churning. People who looked "risky" on paper turned out to be some of our best hires. The assessments had become a checkbox that added 3 days to our process without adding much clarity.

The bigger issue was how candidates were responding to it. Agency talent, especially experienced creatives and strategists, started dropping out of the process when they hit the assessment stage. We were filtering out good people before we even got to talk to them.

So we cut it. Rebuilt around structured behavioral interviews, work samples, and a short paid trial project for final-round candidates. Mis-hires went down, and offer acceptance went up.

Curious if anyone else has gone through this process. Did assessments actually work for your agency, or did you find the same gaps we did? And if they did work, what were you doing differently?

So, we've been going back and forth on this for months and I still don't have a clear answer. We keep hiring people who interview really well and then just... don't perform once they're actually in the role. Great on paper, great in conversation, struggles when it counts.

We're looking at pre-hire assessment software for HR teams to add some structure before the final round. But I've heard enough mixed opinions that I'm not sure what to believe. Some people swear by them, others say they just add steps without adding clarity.

For those who've actually used them, did they change who you hired? Or did you end up back at gut feeling anyway?