Mea Culpa — Admitting The Arrogance Of Making Sales Candidates Deliver Demos Of Your Product

It began innocently and well-intended enough. About 15 years ago I was on a search for my successor; I had accepted a position at a new startup in Seattle and was fortunate enough to be leaving my then current employer on great terms. My VP and I sat down to plan the transition and open a search for a new leader for my team. The company I worked for, Onvia, is a B2B technology company that sells data products to companies to help them win more business in the public sector. Our sales reps had to convince prospects that paying for data that was otherwise free was a worthwhile investment due to the value of our platform. Piece of cake, right? As that search ramped up, we decided to include a step in the interview process where final candidates would deliver a demo of Onvia’s platform to a handful of team members before we made a hiring decision. The objective was to best assess how well a candidate could communicate the value of our products to the sales team and to our target market. Candidates took up the challenge so we took that as validation of the process. We hired one of those candidates and I moved on to the next phase of my career. Each of the five sales leadership roles I’ve taken have had one common thread: I was recruited to build a new team from the ground up. In all cases, it was either the first sales team a new company ever hired or they were launching a team that was hired to sell in a brand new way for the company. In all but one of those team-building roles, I included the product demo as a core element of the final round of interviews for candidates at all levels — inside sales, account managers, customer success reps, sales engineers, field execs and new team managers. Today, I am formally apologizing to all of those candidates who were subjected to that step. Whether you hit it out of the park, crashed and burned, got offered the job, or were turned down, I am sorry. Here’s why… Interviewing today, especially in the tech industry, makes The Hunger Games look like a baby shower. If you’ve ever interviewed for a job, any job, you undoubtedly have a horror story to share so there’s no need to rehash anecdotes here. We all have them. In total, I’ve estimated that I have conducted at least 1,000 of these candidate demos with people who wanted to work at Onvia, Parallels, Tableau or Paxata. And while many of those product sessions helped inform the hiring decision, I can say with 100% confidence that it was never a deciding factor. If a candidate did really well in that demo session, but generally wasn’t able to connect the dots in other areas, the great demo didn’t tip the scales to an offer. Likewise, the candidate demo being a train wreck didn’t keep me from extending an offer to join the team if their potential success was demonstrated through the other aspects of the process. So why did we do them? The justification for including a demo of the product that candidates would be selling can vary from team to team, but it typically gets included to help: Assess their presentation skills and communication style Evaluate their resourcefulness and ability to learn something new on their own Measure their enthusiasm and passion for your solutions or your industry or your audience In most cases, the demos are conducted in front of an audience of two or three prospective teammates. The hiring team believes this type of format mimics the potential scenarios a sales person would find themselves in during a normal day on the job; pitching a product in person or over a web conference to a handful of prospects at a company is how most technology products are marketed to businesses. Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities end and the torment begins. If demos are required to join a team, over time it becomes both revered and reviled as a rite of passage in the culture of the organization. As I said before, not everyone who got hired did a great demo and make no mistake — the ones who did get hired after a bad demo never live it down. And the instant street-cred someone enjoyed when they nailed that interview demo is often overstated. Those downsides are only the tip of the iceberg. As a team grows, more and more people get tapped to join an interview panel for candidate demos. Usually with little to no training on how to conduct themselves, what to ask, or how to be respectful. You begin to see panelists play games with candidates and try to trip them up, often steering the candidate down a dead end or into an area they didn’t expect to cover. We all know what happens then, right? Those team members leave the interview feeling very pleased in their ability to stump the rookie, and the candidate leaves feeling defeated and unfairly judged after (in many, many cases) preparing for hours for this gauntlet-style interview loop. Even when they get hired, they carry that baggage forward into their first few weeks on the job and beyond. Debriefing after a round of interviews that include these demonstration stages is typically how teams weigh in, and the demo feedback tends to take an outsized role in the debate. ‘They didn’t know how to…’ and ‘Did you see how they reacted when I asked…’ or ‘Wow, did you see them break out in a sweat when we…’ and on and on. What you end up with is an impression of a candidate that is heavily influenced by the opinions of insiders poking holes in what simply amounts to the lack of training of a person who can always do a better job once they have experienced an effective on-boarding process. As I began to see the negative impacts of this type of step play out within my team, I made changes to the demo requirement to improve it’s effectiveness and attempt reduce the pain on all sides. Some of those changes included a more thorough interview prep guide that helped candidates better understand the process and what we were expecting from them. My recruiting team and my managers would share with candidates that we wanted them to be successful and directed them to seek out and use all available product resources to prepare. We also encouraged candidates to personalize their presentation so they had more ownership of the content and not just use existing use cases. I reduced the number of employees who joined these sessions and would often step in to redirect a question when I believed it was a land mine. Some people were not asked to evaluate candidate demos again if they were observed playing hard ball. And I also switched up the order so the demo was at the end and didn’t handicap the candidate for the rest of the one-on-0ne sessions in the loop. I believe all of those helped, without a doubt. But it didn’t go far enough. In the title, I said this was a process that I believe now to be a reflection of an arrogant culture. What I mean by that conclusion is that a truly effective interview process should not only make everyone feel respected and well-informed in making a decision — both to hire and to accept, or not—but both sides of the table should put in equal effort. Managers who place these types of booby-traps in the interview process do so because they either do not appreciate the candidate’s perspective or because they believe people are lucky to work for them so they can require arduous steps before granting them a decision. Probably both. These are also the same managers who refuse to give candidates honest feedback, if they even bother to close out a loop at all with the candidates who do not get offers. If you are a manager who has a process like this in place today, I recommend reconsidering it. Take a few steps back and look closely at the reasons (the real ones) you want a candidate to do it and talk with your hiring team about a better way to get what you need from candidates. Subjecting them to something as unreasonable as require them to become an expert at selling an unfamiliar product to experts who have been trained is unreasonable and hurts your reputation in the talent communities from which you hire. If the reason is ‘everyone has always had to do it, it’s part of our culture’ or if it is ‘we do it to see how a candidate handles the pressure’ then you are doing it for the wrong reasons — and the best candidates won’t be who you are able to hire. If you want to assess a candidates presentation skills, then have them present on something they know well already and ask them in the interview how they could translate those skills to be effective at presenting your technology. Don’t be lazy and expect the candidates with the highest potential value for your team to do all of the work while you sit back and judge. These are sales people, not cardiovascular surgeons. If they are qualified and capable, they will learn how to effectively sell your technology once you train them how to do it well. For those of you who are candidates being asked to learn a product and present it to a panel as part of an interview with a sales team, I suggest you propose an alternative to that manager or recruiter. Share with them that you are willing to put time and energy into a presentation, but that you believe they can best evaluate your sales and presentation capabilities when you are presenting on solid footing. If they push back flippantly on your suggestion by saying it’s a requirement to progress in the interview cycle, I would encourage you to think long and hard about joining a culture where a practice like that is held in such esteem. It is likely an indication of a broader set of challenges within the team that will hold you back in more ways than just expecting you to say ‘how high?’. Happy Hiring Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor! Our mission at EyeLevel Software is to help people join and build successful teams. If you hire people at your company, you should be using EyeLevel.