Five criteria. every candidate. no exceptions
By Andrew Devlin/andrewdevlin.co/insights
In the last post, I introduced The Draft Board — five criteria I have used to evaluate every sales candidate I have considered hiring over more than two decades. The framework came up in the context of a hire I made early in my career: a candidate with no technology experience, no industry knowledge, and a resume that listed selling athletic shoes from the trunk of his car as his primary sales experience. Within twelve months, he was our top performer.
I mentioned that what I was reading for — without having named it yet — was Will, Processing Power, Adversity Quotient, Cultural Fit, and Skill. In that order.
Several people asked about the order. Specifically, why Skill comes last. That question deserves a full answer, because the order is not arbitrary. It reflects what the research says about where hiring failures actually originate — and what twenty-five years of building sales teams has taught me about which qualities can be developed after hire and which ones cannot.
This post is that answer.
Why Order Matters
Most hiring processes are built around the path of least resistance. Skills and experience are easy to evaluate — they are right there on the resume, confirmed in the first ten minutes of an interview. Coachability, drive, resilience, and cultural contribution are harder to surface, so they get less scrutiny, less time, and less weight in the final decision.
The result is a process optimized for what is easy to measure rather than what actually predicts performance. Leadership IQ's study of 20,000+ new hires found that attitudes drive 89% of hiring failures, while technical skills account for just 11%.1 The implication is clear: most companies spend the majority of their interview process evaluating the minority of what determines success.
The Draft Board inverts that. It starts with what is hardest to develop after hire and ends with what is most teachable. Each criterion is assessed in order, and a candidate who fails on criterion one does not advance to criterion two — not because the other criteria do not matter, but because no amount of skill compensates for the absence of what comes first.
| # | Criterion | The core question | % of failures when absent* |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Will | Do they want it badly enough? | 17% |
| 2 | Processing Power | How fast do they think and absorb? | 26% |
| 3 | Adversity Quotient | Can they take a hit and keep going? | 15% |
| 4 | Cultural Fit | Do they make the team better? | 23% |
| 5 | Skill | Can they do the technical job? | 11% |
*Source: Leadership IQ, "Why New Hires Fail" / Hiring for Attitude, Mark Murphy. N=20,000+ new hires across 312 organizations.
Criterion 1: Will
Will is the question underneath every other question in an interview. It is not about enthusiasm — anyone can perform enthusiasm for forty-five minutes. It is about the internal drive that persists when the quarter is sideways, when the pipeline is thin, and when the easiest thing in the world would be to go through the motions and wait for a better month.
The research on this is unambiguous. A comprehensive meta-analysis of 127 studies covering more than 1,200 effect sizes, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, found that intrinsic motivation is more strongly associated with sales performance than extrinsic motivation.2 Financial incentives work — up to a point. Ariely, Gneezy, Loewenstein, and Mazar's landmark study — conducted at MIT, the University of Chicago, and rural India — found that for tasks requiring any degree of cognitive skill, larger financial rewards actually led to poorer performance.3 The implication for sales — a role that is almost entirely cognitive — is that once a rep has a stable income, money becomes an increasingly weak predictor of effort and quality of work.
Will also cannot be installed after hire. It can be channeled, directed, and recognized — great coaching does all three. But the underlying drive either exists at the time of hire or it does not. A rep without genuine Will does not just underperform. They deplete the energy of everyone around them. They require supervision that a manager should be spending on development. They drag forecast conversations toward justification rather than strategy.
The interview question that reveals Will is not "where do you see yourself in five years." It is the question that forces the candidate to describe how they behaved when nothing external was pushing them forward. What did they do in the last bad quarter? How did they generate their own momentum? What does their activity look like when no one is watching?
Criterion 2: Processing Power
Processing Power is the ability to absorb new information quickly, think clearly under pressure, and translate coaching into changed behaviour — not over weeks, but within days. In complex B2B sales, where the product, the customer, the competitive landscape, and the internal stakeholders are all variables that shift in every deal, this is not a nice-to-have. It is load-bearing.
Research by the Korn Ferry Institute found that employees with high learning agility — the capacity to learn from experience and apply it rapidly in new situations — are 45% more likely to be high performers than their peers.4 The Vinchur meta-analysis of sales hiring predictors found that general mental ability (GMA) is among the strongest predictors of sales performance, particularly in consultative and complex selling environments where problem-solving and strategic thinking are required throughout the sales cycle.5
Processing Power is also why Leadership IQ identified coachability — the ability to accept and implement feedback — as the single largest cause of new hire failure at 26%.1 A rep who cannot process a coaching correction and apply it quickly is not just slow to develop. They are actively resisting the most important input their manager can give them. Multiply that resistance across a full team and you understand why some sales organizations feel like they are coaching the same people the same lessons every quarter with no discernible improvement.
The hire who sold shoes from the trunk of a car demonstrated Processing Power in the first thirty days of the role. He absorbed the product faster than anyone expected, asked better questions than experienced colleagues, and applied feedback from call debriefs the same day. He did not know the technology. He understood how to learn.
In an interview, Processing Power shows up in how a candidate handles a question they have not prepared for. The rep who pauses, thinks, and offers a structured response is demonstrating something different from the rep who either blanks or pivots to a rehearsed answer. Watch what happens when you introduce complexity mid-conversation. That is when you see how the engine runs under load.
Criterion 3: Adversity Quotient
Sales is an adversarial environment by design. There are lost deals, difficult customers, cold streaks, quarters that do not cooperate, and moments when the thing you worked hardest on falls apart for reasons outside your control. The question is not whether a rep will face adversity. They will. The question is what they do in the moment after.
The concept of Adversity Quotient was developed by Dr. Paul Stoltz, whose nineteen years of research established AQ as a measure of a person's capacity to respond constructively to difficult situations — distinct from both IQ and EQ. Stoltz's central argument was that AQ explains why people with high intelligence and emotional awareness still fall short of their potential: they have not developed the patterns of response that allow them to persist through and recover from setbacks.6
The practical evidence is compelling. Research on retail store managers found a direct correlation between composure under pressure and sales performance across four separate metrics — net profits, sales per square foot, sales per employee, and revenue per dollar of inventory.7 The managers who remained most composed under the same pressures consistently ran the highest-performing stores — not because adversity disappeared, but because they had developed the capacity to absorb it without losing forward momentum.
There is a distinction worth making here between temperament and optimism. I am not looking for someone who is relentlessly upbeat — that profile often masks an unwillingness to confront bad news directly, which is fatal in a sales environment that depends on accurate forecasting and honest deal qualification. I am looking for someone who is clear-eyed about adversity and action-oriented in response to it. Those are different things, and great interview questions surface the difference.
Ask a candidate to walk you through a stretch of genuinely bad weeks — a quarter where nothing went right. The rep with high AQ will describe the situation specifically, take appropriate ownership of what was in their control, and explain what they did to change their trajectory. The rep with low AQ will describe the situation vaguely, attribute failures to external factors, and offer a version of events where they were largely a spectator. Both answers tell you everything.
Criterion 4: Cultural Fit
Cultural Fit is the most misunderstood criterion on The Draft Board. When most companies talk about culture fit, they mean familiarity — someone who looks like the existing team, talks like the existing team, and will not disrupt the existing team. That is not what I mean.
There is a well-known thought experiment about five monkeys placed in a cage with a banana hanging at the top of a ladder. Every time a monkey climbs toward the banana, all five are doused with cold water. Eventually the monkeys stop climbing — and start pulling back any monkey who tries. Then you remove one monkey and introduce a new one. The new monkey heads for the banana. The others drag it back, even though none of them knows why anymore. Replace them one by one, and eventually you have a cage full of monkeys who have never been sprayed with cold water, enforcing a rule no one can explain, simply because that is how things have always been done. The new monkey never gets the banana — not because the banana is unreachable, but because the system has been optimized to prevent the attempt.
Hiring for familiarity builds that cage. It produces teams that think the same way, challenge each other less, and plateau earlier — not because the people are underqualified, but because the system selects against the very qualities that would push it forward. If you keep hiring the same profile, you will keep getting the same results.
What I mean by Cultural Fit is contribution. Does this person make the team better? Are they generous with colleagues, transparent about what is and is not working, and genuinely invested in the team's results rather than just their own? Do they demonstrate a team-before-self mentality in how they talk about previous employers and previous colleagues? Those qualities create environments where performance compounds — where the rising tide lifts every rep, not just the one at the top of the leaderboard.
The research on emotional intelligence — the closest validated construct to what I mean by Cultural Fit — is striking. In his research across nearly 200 large global companies, Daniel Goleman found that truly effective leaders were distinguished by a high degree of emotional intelligence — not IQ or technical skill, which he described as the "entry-level requirements" for executive positions.8 TalentSmart tested EQ alongside 33 other workplace skills and found it is the single strongest predictor of performance, explaining 58% of success across all job types — with the impact most pronounced in roles requiring relationship-building and resilience under pressure, which describes sales exactly.9 Google's Project Aristotle, which studied hundreds of teams to understand what made the highest performers successful, found that the most effective teams were not the smartest or the hardest working — they were the teams where members felt psychologically safe, respected one another, and listened well.10 In other words: the teams with the highest collective emotional intelligence.
A technically proficient rep who poisons the culture is not an asset. They are a liability with a good quota number. The damage they do to team morale, trust, and cohesion — and to the manager's time — will exceed whatever revenue they produce. Leadership IQ's data shows that 23% of new hire failures are attributable to poor emotional intelligence.1 In my experience, the ripple effects of those failures extend well beyond the rep themselves.
Cultural Fit is assessed through the stories a candidate tells. Ask them about the best team they ever worked on. Ask them what made it the best. Ask them about a colleague who struggled, and what they did about it. The rep who describes a team by naming the outcomes they achieved together is telling you something different from the rep who describes a team by ranking where they finished individually on the leaderboard. Both answers are informative. Only one belongs on a high-performance team.
Criterion 5: Skill
Skill is last. Deliberately.
This is the criterion that dominates most hiring processes — the one that generates the most resume scrutiny, the most interview questions, the most weight in the final debrief. And it is the least predictive of whether the hire will succeed. The Leadership IQ data is unambiguous: only 11% of new hire failures are caused by insufficient technical skill.1 The Vinchur meta-analysis found that prior sales experience was only moderately predictive of future performance, and was consistently less effective as a predictor than cognitive ability or personality traits.5
The argument for putting Skill last is not that Skill does not matter. It does. A rep needs to understand the product, the customer, the competitive landscape, and the sales methodology. But Skill is the one criterion on this list that can be substantially developed after hire. A rep with Will, Processing Power, Adversity Quotient, and Cultural Fit present at high levels will acquire Skill faster than anyone who came with the Skill already in place but was missing any of the first four. That is not a theory. It is a pattern I have watched play out across more than two decades and hundreds of hires.
The candidate who sold shoes from the trunk of his car had no Skill by any conventional measure. No technology background. No enterprise sales experience. No understanding of the product category. What he had was Will at a level I had rarely seen, Processing Power that allowed him to absorb a complex product in weeks rather than months, an Adversity Quotient built by years of 100% commission with no safety net, and a cultural contribution that elevated every person around him. Skill was the one thing he was missing. It was also the one thing I was least worried about.
Within twelve months, the Skill had arrived. Everything else was already there on day one.
Applying The Draft Board
The framework only works if it is applied consistently. That means building structured interview questions around each criterion before the first candidate walks in the door — not improvising based on what seems interesting in the moment. It means scoring each criterion independently rather than letting a strong performance on Skill override a weak read on Will. And it means treating a failure on any early criterion as disqualifying, even when the candidate is impressive on paper and the role has been open for two months.
The pressure to hire quickly is real. An open territory is a missing quota contributor. Every week without a rep in a seat is pipeline that does not get built. That pressure is the single most common reason companies compromise on the first four criteria and hire on Skill alone. And it is the primary reason that 46% of new hires fail within eighteen months, that the average cost of a bad sales hire exceeds one million dollars, and that the same companies are conducting the same hiring search eighteen months later.11
The Draft Board is not a guarantee. It is a discipline. Applied consistently, it moves the odds in your favour — not by eliminating uncertainty, but by ensuring you are evaluating the things that actually predict performance rather than the things that are easiest to see.
Build the scorecard before the search begins. Know what you are looking for before the candidate is in front of you. And remember that the order is not a suggestion.
One final discipline that separates good hiring from great hiring: ask every candidate the same questions, in the same order, and score each response against the same criteria. This is not bureaucracy — it is the single most effective protection against the unconscious biases that make hiring feel like a gut call when it should be a data-driven decision. The candidate who went to the same university as your hiring manager, told a funny story, and reminded someone of themselves will feel like a strong hire. Whether they are a strong hire requires a consistent process that controls for that feeling.
Lean toward the math. Track scores across candidates and across criteria. Over time, you will see which criterion your team consistently underweights and which one your interviewers consistently let override everything else. That pattern is where your hiring process needs the most discipline — and where The Draft Board, applied consistently, does its best work.
Sources
1. Leadership IQ. "Why New Hires Fail" / Hiring for Attitude, Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ. Study tracked 5,247 hiring managers from 312 organizations, assessing outcomes of 20,000+ new hires. Failure causes in order: coachability 26%, emotional intelligence 23%, motivation 17%, temperament 15%, technical skills 11%. Reported in Fortune and Forbes.
2. Good, V., Hughes, D.E., Kirca, A.H., & McGrath, S. (2022). "A Self-Determination Theory-Based Meta-Analysis on the Differential Effects of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation on Salesperson Performance." Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. 127 studies, 1,242 effect sizes.
3. Ariely, D., Gneezy, U., Loewenstein, G., & Mazar, N. (2009). "Large Stakes and Big Mistakes." Review of Economic Studies, 76(2), 451–469. Originally published as Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-11 (2005). Experiments conducted at MIT, the University of Chicago, and rural India.
4. Korn Ferry Institute, cited in Adaface, "Learning Agility: What It Is, Examples & How to Assess It" (2023). Employees with high learning agility are 45% more likely to be high performers.
5. Vinchur, A.J., Schippmann, J.S., Switzer, F.S., & Roth, P.L. (1998). "A Meta-Analytic Review of Predictors of Job Performance for Salespeople." Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(4), 586–597. GMA and personality traits outperformed prior experience as performance predictors, particularly in complex/consultative B2B sales.
6. Stoltz, P.G. (1997). Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities. John Wiley & Sons. Founded on 19 years of research; introduced the CORE framework (Control, Ownership, Reach, Endurance).
7. Goleman, D. (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books. Citing Davidson resilience research on retail store managers: composure under pressure correlated with store performance across four metrics.
8. Goleman, D. (1998). "What Makes a Leader?" Harvard Business Review, 76(6), 93–102. Based on research across nearly 200 large global companies. Goleman found effective leaders were distinguished by EQ, describing IQ and technical skills as "entry-level requirements for executive positions."
9. Bradberry, T. & Greaves, J. (2009). Emotional Intelligence 2.0. TalentSmart. EQ tested alongside 33 other workplace skills; found to be the single strongest predictor of performance, explaining 58% of success across all job types.
10. Google Project Aristotle (2016), reported by The New York Times and cited in multiple subsequent studies on team performance. Highest-performing teams characterised by psychological safety and mutual respect, not raw intelligence or technical skill.
11. Leadership IQ (ibid., source 1) for the 46% failure rate within 18 months; SBI Growth, "The Cost of a Bad Sales Hire: A Million-Dollar Mistake" for the $1M+ cost figure.