How we hire career reps

Every SDR job posting attracts two kinds of applicants: people who want to be SDRs, and people who want to be anything else and will take this in the meantime. The industry runs on the second kind, which is part of why turnover in the role sits at 34 to 40 percent a year, roughly triple the all-role average. Our entire model depends on the first kind, so our hiring process is built to find them, and it looks different from a standard sales-floor pipeline.

Who we are actually looking for

The phrase we use internally is career rep: someone who treats sales development as a craft worth getting good at, not a tollbooth on the way to a closing seat. They exist, and they are identifiable. They are usually a few years into the work rather than fresh out of school. They talk about specific calls the way a golfer talks about specific swings. They like the phone, which sounds like a low bar until you interview twenty candidates and count how many flinch at it. And they want the thing this job actually offers when it is built right: variety across clients, real coaching, and a compensation path that does not require abandoning the craft to advance.

The screens

The first screen is a phone call, deliberately unscheduled in its feel. We are listening for the things a resume cannot carry: tone, pacing, recovery when interrupted, whether the candidate asks about the work or only about the ladder. Candidates who ask what a typical coaching week looks like move forward. Candidates who open with how quickly they can move off the phones do not.

The second screen is a live role-play, twice. The candidate cold calls one of our managers, who plays a distracted director with one objection ready. Then we replay the recording together, ask the candidate to critique their own call, hand them one specific note, and run it again. The first run tells us where they are. The second run tells us the only thing that matters long-term: whether a note given at 2 p.m. shows up in behavior at 2:15. Coachability is the whole ballgame in this role, and it cannot be interviewed for with questions. It has to be watched.

What disqualifies

• Contempt for the phone. "I'm really more of an email person" ends the process. The role is phone-first and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's year.
• A history explained entirely by other people. Every miss at every past job was the list, the territory, the manager. Reps who own nothing learn nothing.
• The note that bounces off. If the second role-play is identical to the first, the coaching we invest weekly would bounce off the same way.
• The role as an apology. A candidate who spends the first ten minutes explaining what they would rather be doing has answered the only question we had.

The economics of all this are straightforward. The fully loaded cost of an SDR seat is dominated by churn and re-ramp, so a hiring process that selects for people who stay and compound is not a nicety. It is the margin. It is also why we run our own recruiting continuously rather than per-vacancy, especially through the short Q1 hiring window when the strongest candidates move.

When a client signs at the published price, the rep they get came through every screen above. If you want to hear what that sounds like on a live call, book a strategy call and ask us to play you one.