8-Week Interview

As a hiring manager, you understand the distinct challenges of selecting an applicant based on their resume and their presentation in a brief, one-hour interview. Even if you’ve had a series of interviews with an applicant, have invited them on “ride-alongs,” and have assessed their performance on sales aptitude tests, the information you are able to glean about an applicant and their preparedness for a position in medical device sales is quite limited.

You may ask yourself, are they really a good salesperson? Do they have good work habits? How motivated are they to succeed? Can they effectively work a territory? These are all questions that cannot truly be answered with such a limited interview experience.

What we have learned and discovered is that our students are much more likely to be successful, in large part because we are able to provide very specific information about those candidates to the hiring managers that are interested in hiring our graduates.

Our placement services provider, EliteMed Recruiting, works together with instructors at the Medical Sales College to summarize a candidate’s progression (or lack thereof) over an entire 8-week period. Each student is scored in one of five areas that we have identified to be critical indicators of sales success. These areas are:

• Personality
• Effort
• Technical Skill
• Sales Skill, and
• Intangibles

These five factors make up what we call the PETSI Score. The PETSI Score is determined through a collective evaluation of all the trainers who interacted with an individual during their 8-week program. How prepared were they for class? Did they show up early and did they stay late? How much effort did they show over the course of the program? Did they comprehend and internalize the material? How did they perform in sales presentations and role-plays?

This scoring system allows a hiring manager to evaluate the merits of an individual over a two-month period instead of just a one-hour interview. The PETSI Score is a comprehensive indicator of future success, and gives a hiring manager confidence that their new hire will, in fact, be able to make a positive contribution toward their bottom line.