How to Hire a Sales Development Rep: Personality Traits, Interview Questions and Assessment

Hiring Sales Development Representatives is one of the toughest challenges modern revenue teams face. Across 939 B2B companies, SDR turnover averages 45 percent annually—and in high-growth SaaS organizations it can spike above 65 percent, leaving average tenure at just 14 to 18 months. Each mis-hire isn’t just a vacant seat: replacing a single underperforming SDR consumes between $170K and $200K in salary, ramp time, lost deals, and recruiting expenses, and opportunity-cost models for a $100K base rep can exceed $1M. Meanwhile, median ramp time stretches 3.2 to 4 months, and 20 to 30 percent of SDRs quit before they ever reach full quota, effectively wiping out an entire quarter of pipeline coverage on day one.

Recruiters wrestle with massive applicant pools of early-career candidates who lack robust performance histories, and false positives run rampant when surface charisma is mistaken for perseverance. Add pressure to fill seats quickly to hit pipeline targets, promotion promises that fall flat, and unstructured gut-feel interviews whose validity can be below 0.20, and you have a perfect storm. Traditional reference checks bring minimal incremental value, and hiring decisions based on anecdotes and surface traits too often result in another mis-matched SDR and wasted budget.

Over the past three decades, meta-analyses by Barrick and Mount (1991), Schmidt and Hunter (1998), and subsequent reviews have established that no single selection method provides a silver-bullet solution. Unstructured interviews routinely yield validity coefficients below 0.20, largely because gut-feel judgments overweigh charisma and superficial traits. In contrast, structured interviews anchored to behavioral examples improve validity to around 0.38, general cognitive ability tests to about 0.51, and combining methods—with the addition of validated personality measures—can push predictive validity above 0.60.

The power of a multi-method approach lies in capitalizing on each tool’s strengths. Personality assessments capture stable trait variance that underpins long-term behaviors like persistence and discipline. Structured interviews document concrete past behaviors, while work-sample exercises simulate critical tasks under real conditions. When these data streams converge, you effectively filter out noise from resume padding and fleeting first impressions, aligning hiring decisions with the enduring drivers of SDR success.

Importantly, integrating these methods also helps mitigate adverse impact concerns under the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. By weighting assessments appropriately—typically 25 percent personality, 30 percent structured interviews, and 35 percent work samples—you balance predictive power with fairness and legal defensibility.

Designing an efficient, high-fidelity SDR hiring funnel means sequencing assessments to filter out non-fits early while preserving candidate experience. Begin with a simple resume screen and role-relevant knock-out questions, then administer an online Big Five personality assessment. Tools like SeeMyPersonality can generate instant trait reports and customized interview kits, but the key principle is pairing trait data with real-world tasks rather than relying on it alone.

Next, deploy a brief work-sample exercise—such as a cold-call role-play or email-rewrite task—scored on a transparent rubric to evaluate practical skills. Follow with a structured behavioral interview using the questions above. Finally, convene a calibrated decision meeting where you weight personality results (around 25 percent), work-sample performance (35 percent), interview ratings (30 percent), and experience or cultural factors (10 percent). This balanced approach maximizes predictive validity while minimizing biases and legal risk.