Hiring/Integrity Assessment

Why Integrity Matters in the Sales Process
What is QFS's Integrity Assessment Testing?
Why Our Integrity Assessment Is More Effective
How QFS's Integrity Assessment Benefits Companies and Hiring Managers

Why Integrity Matters in the Sales Process

Integrity matters now more than ever for companies that want to succeed in today's highly competitive marketplace. Customers value integrity in companies and salespeople and it is an important factor when deciding to which firms they will give their business. The bottom-line: Customers want to work with people they trust and believe.

A recent survey from Gallup and the Better Business Bureau illustrates just how serious this issue has become and why financial firms should take action. The April 2008 report stated consumers are losing trust in companies at an unprecedented rate:

• In a seven-month period, trust in 13 of 15 major industries dropped by nearly 15%.
• 47% of consumers surveyed said they have "very little or no" trust in business.
• Only 42% of those surveyed said they have "a great deal of trust" in financial institutions and banks, down from 48% six months ago.

Integrity is essential to moving the customer relationship forward. Hiring sales candidates with integrity is not only the right thing to do — it's a smart business practice for companies interested in building long-term relationships with their customers.

How can managers ensure that the sales candidates they hire have high integrity? One solution is integrity assessment testing.

What is QFS's Integrity Assessment Testing?

After a year of extensive research with leading financial industry companies and their managers and sales professionals, QFS Group has developed a pre-hire assessment that identifies potential high-risk integrity issues and other counter-productive behaviors in sales candidates.

The study involved managers rating their salespeople on 25 separate areas including eight categories related to integrity and two categories that represented performance.

For the integrity portion of the study, we examined the following eight performance categories:

1. Interpersonal Integrity
2. Customer Integrity
3. External Judgment
4. Internal Judgment
5. Trust
6. Teamwork
7. Emotional Control
8. Overall Integrity Rating

For the sales performance portion of the study, we asked managers to rate their salespeople on the following issues:

1. How the salesperson's production compared to others in the same job
2. How the salesperson rated in general

When we analyzed the study results, we found a strong correlation between those who received low scores on the integrity suite and those who were rated fair to poor on production by their managers. For salespeople who scored low in integrity, there was a 78 percent chance that the individual was also a low performer.

Why Our Integrity Assessment Is More Effective

There are a lot of companies out there offering assessment testing but not many firms offer effective pre-hire integrity assessment testing. Here are a few of the reasons our integrity assessment beats out the competition:

• Our assessment is customized for the financial services industry. This is not a generic integrity test but an assessment geared specifically for commission salespeople in financial services. Our assessment is based on extensive research with three Top 50 financial firms encompassing 800 salespeople.
• Our assessment identifies low integrity in sales candidates with 78 percent accuracy.
• Our test reveals a strong correlation between those who received low scores on the integrity suite and those who were rated fair to poor on production by their managers.
  

How QFS's Integrity Assessment Benefits Companies and Hiring Managers

Our integrity assessment benefits companies and hiring managers in a number of ways including:

• Sends a message to sales candidates that integrity is an important corporate value.
• Helps managers hire better quality salespeople which ultimately leads to better sales results.
• Helps hiring managers conduct better, more in-depth interviews.
• Helps managers prioritize which sales candidates to move further in the interview process.
• Promotes better credibility in the marketplace by requiring integrity testing as part of the screening process.