What CVI Profiles Tend to Perform Well at SalesFirst Recruiting?

We have used the Core Values Index at SalesFirst for years, both in our own hiring and with clients. Over that time, we have noticed that many of our strongest producers fall into a handful of profiles: Builder/Merchant, Merchant/Builder, Builder/Innovator, Merchant/Innovator, and Builder/Banker.

That does not mean somebody with one of those profiles will automatically be a good recruiter, or that somebody outside of them cannot succeed here. We do not think an assessment score can tell you that. What the CVI does give us is a useful way to think about which parts of recruiting somebody is likely to enjoy, which parts they will tolerate, and which parts they may have to work pretty hard to overcome.

That last part matters because recruiting is a grind. There are some very enjoyable parts of the job, but underneath them is an enormous amount of repetitive work. You source, send messages, follow up, review resumes, interview candidates, write notes, prepare people for interviews, debrief them afterward, and then do most of it again. We believe in structure and process, so we are not trying to eliminate that repetition. A lot of becoming good at recruiting is doing the same basic things enough times that your judgment gets better.

There is also a significant amount of autonomy here. Most of our recruiters work from home, and once someone knows what they are doing, we are not particularly interested in managing every hour of their day. Your numbers do a lot of the talking, and your manager is a recruiter and mentor who understands the work because they still do it themselves.

That combination of autonomy and repetition is important. Nobody is standing over you making sure you do the boring part. You have to make yourself do it.

The other part people sometimes underestimate is influence. We want recruiters who enjoy exerting some influence over people. That does not mean manipulating somebody into doing something that is bad for them. It means listening well enough to develop an opinion, being willing to make a recommendation, and enjoying the challenge of getting somebody to follow you when you believe the recommendation is right. There is a thrill in that, and somebody who is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of influencing another person's decision is probably going to find parts of recruiting difficult.

The interesting thing about the CVI profiles we have seen succeed is that they arrive at all of this differently.

Builder/Merchant

Builder/Merchants make a lot of intuitive sense to us as recruiters. They tend to like people, action, influence, competition, and measurable results, and recruiting gives them plenty of all five. There are searches to fill, candidates to move, interviews to create, offers to close, and commissions attached to getting results. The Merchant gets to interact with people while the Builder gets the satisfaction of moving something toward an outcome.

They also tend to have a pretty good relationship with the grind. That does not necessarily mean they enjoy repetitive sourcing or follow-up. It means the Builder can usually connect that repetitive activity to a result. If another hour of sourcing creates another candidate and another candidate creates another interview, the work has a purpose. The Builder can turn a boring afternoon into a production problem and keep going.

That same Builder energy can create trouble with our structure. Builder/Merchants can get impatient and move too quickly, particularly when they believe they already understand where something is going. They may want to skip a question, shorten a process, or push a candidate toward a decision before they have really understood the hesitation. The Merchant can make that worse because they may feel confident that the relationship is strong and therefore assume they know more than they actually do.

Influence usually comes pretty naturally to this profile. They can enjoy making the case for an opportunity, challenging someone's assumptions, and getting a candidate to take an interview they initially were not sure about. What they have to learn is that influence gets better when you listen longer. Sometimes the fastest way to move somebody is to stop trying to move them for a few minutes and figure out what is actually going on.

Merchant/Builder

Merchant/Builders have many of the same ingredients, but the order changes how they tend to experience the job. They usually get more of their energy from the people first. They enjoy meeting candidates, developing relationships, hearing people's stories, building a network, and eventually becoming somebody candidates trust when they are thinking about their careers.

The Builder underneath matters quite a bit because it helps turn all of that relationship energy into production. A Merchant without enough drive toward an outcome can have a lot of great conversations without accomplishing much. The Builder gives the Merchant/Builder more desire to move the relationship somewhere, which is obviously important in recruiting.

Their relationship with the grind tends to depend on what kind of repetitive work we are talking about. Repeated candidate conversations may not bother them much because every person is different. Sitting alone and sourcing, documenting activity, cleaning up records, or following up with somebody for the fourth time is different. The Builder helps them push through it, but the Merchant would generally rather be talking to somebody than doing the machinery required to create the next conversation.

They can also have some difficulty when influence turns into conflict. There are times in recruiting when being good to somebody requires telling them something they do not particularly want to hear. A candidate may have interviewed poorly. Their compensation expectations may be unrealistic. They may be making a mistake in how they are approaching an opportunity. A client may be making a search unnecessarily difficult. Merchant/Builders can know all of that and still feel the pull to protect the relationship.

The Builder usually helps. At some point the desire to get the right result can become stronger than the desire to keep the conversation comfortable. The better Merchant/Builders learn that a good relationship can survive disagreement and that being influential sometimes means being willing to create a little tension.

Builder/Innovator

Builder/Innovator is another profile we like quite a bit. These people can be very independent, very driven, and very good at figuring things out. Give them a difficult search and some room to operate and they may spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to crack it.

Recruiting provides plenty for both sides of the profile. The Innovator gets a problem to solve while the Builder gets an outcome to chase. Why aren't we finding the right candidates? Is the compensation wrong? Are we looking in the wrong place? Does the title mean something different in this industry? Is the client describing one person while actually wanting another? Those are interesting recruiting problems, and a good Builder/Innovator can develop strong opinions about how to solve them and then act on those opinions.

They also tend to like our autonomy. Once they understand the job, they generally do not need or want somebody constantly telling them what to do next.

The grind is more complicated for them.

Builder/Innovators can work extremely hard. The issue is not effort. The issue is what happens after they believe they have figured something out. An Innovator gets satisfaction from solving the problem, and once the problem feels solved, doing the same thing another hundred times can become tedious. They may start wondering why the process needs to be done exactly this way, whether there is a shortcut, or whether they can improve it.

Sometimes they can improve it. We want people thinking about how to get better. But recruiting also has plenty of situations where there is no clever answer. You understand the search. You know who you need. Now you have to sit down and source for another three hours.

That can be a meaningful challenge for this profile. The Builder helps because it still wants the result, but the Builder/Innovator has to learn that understanding a process and having the discipline to repeat it are different things. Some days the most intelligent thing you can do is follow the process you already understand.

They can also get frustrated by how irrational recruiting can be. A candidate can understand every reason an opportunity makes sense and still turn it down. A client can agree with your assessment of the market and continue doing the exact thing that is making the search difficult. People are not problems that stay solved, and Builder/Innovators usually have to develop some patience with that.

Merchant/Innovator

Merchant/Innovators can be very good at some of the most human parts of recruiting. They tend to genuinely like people, and the Innovator makes them curious about what is happening beneath the surface. They can be excellent interviewers because they are interested in more than the resume. They want to understand why somebody is leaving, what they actually want, what motivates them, what they liked about a previous manager, and what might make the next job work better.

Candidates can open up to them. They can pick up contradictions and motivations that somebody else might miss, and they can be thoughtful advisers because they are capable of understanding several sides of a situation.

The grind is a much bigger issue for this profile.

A Merchant wants people, interaction, new relationships, and stimulation. An Innovator wants problems, ideas, and something worth figuring out. Repetitive sourcing gives them very little of either. Neither does sending another batch of similar messages, updating records, following up again, or repeating a process they already understand.

That does not mean Merchant/Innovators are not hard workers. That distinction is important. They can work extremely hard when they are engaged in a difficult candidate situation, an interesting conversation, or a problem they want to understand. The danger is that their effort can become uneven. They gravitate toward the work that gives them energy and have to make themselves do the monotonous work that creates enough opportunities for the interesting work to exist.

There is no way around that at SalesFirst. We can give somebody autonomy, good technology and a process that makes sense, but we cannot make recruiting stop being repetitive. A Merchant/Innovator who wants to become a great producer has to develop the discipline to grind even when neither side of their natural profile is getting much out of it.

The other major challenge for this profile is uncomfortable conversations. Merchant/Innovators can understand people so well that they sometimes become too understanding. The Merchant does not particularly want to damage the relationship, while the Innovator can see all the different reasons somebody might feel the way they do. That is useful right up until somebody needs to say the uncomfortable thing.

A candidate may need to hear that they did not interview well. Someone may obviously be setting themselves up to accept a counteroffer. A candidate's expectations may not match their actual market value. Merchant/Innovators can see the issue perfectly clearly and still spend too much time thinking about how to address it without upsetting the person.

That is a real development area in recruiting. You cannot be a great recruiter if you are only good at comfortable conversations. A Merchant/Innovator who learns to tolerate the grind and becomes willing to create some discomfort when honesty requires it can be very good, because the relationship skills and insight were usually there from the beginning.

Builder/Banker

Builder/Bankers are interesting because they may not fit someone's first impression of what a recruiter should be. Recruiting is usually thought of as a highly social job, but there is an enormous amount of process underneath the social part.

That can fit a Builder/Banker extremely well. The Banker is generally more comfortable with information, structure, documentation, consistency, and repeatable work. In fact, the CVI handbook specifically describes Bankers as people who can do redundant practical work efficiently and later discusses substantial Banker energy as useful in a recruiting environment where repetitive calling and follow-up are required.

Add Builder energy and you have somebody who can connect all of that structure to an outcome.

Of the profiles we see commonly succeed here, this may be the one with the most natural tolerance for the grind. They can work a list, keep records straight, follow up, repeat a process, and continue doing the things that produced yesterday's results without needing today to feel completely different. That is a bigger advantage in recruiting than people realize.

Their challenges are more likely to show up in the messier parts of the job. Recruiting does not provide complete information. Candidates contradict themselves, clients change direction, people make emotional decisions, and sometimes you have to make a judgment before you have all the facts. A Banker can want more certainty than the situation is capable of providing.

Influence can also require more deliberate development. Having the facts right is not the same thing as getting another human being to follow your recommendation. A candidate may understand your analysis and still not feel comfortable taking the interview. Sometimes the recruiter has to connect with the person differently, challenge them, create some excitement, or simply ask them to trust your judgment.

A Builder/Banker who learns to do that has a very useful combination. The grind does not scare them, the structure makes sense to them, and the Builder still wants to win.

Why we care about the differences

What we have learned from using the CVI is that two people can both be capable of becoming good recruiters while paying very different prices for doing the job.

A Builder/Banker may handle repetitive execution almost naturally but have to work at the relationship and influence side. A Merchant/Innovator may be terrific once they are sitting across from a candidate but have to develop enormous discipline around the repetitive work required to get that candidate in front of them. A Builder/Innovator may happily attack a difficult search but get irritated when the answer turns out to be another three hours of sourcing. A Builder/Merchant may grind hard and influence people naturally but need to slow down enough to listen and follow the process. A Merchant/Builder may love the relationships and have enough drive to produce, but still need to become comfortable risking some tension in those relationships.

That is much more useful to us than declaring one profile the ideal recruiter.

We have structure at SalesFirst because recruiting benefits from repetition. We also give people a lot of autonomy because experienced recruiters need room to use judgment. Those two things can sound contradictory until you understand the job. We want people to learn the process well enough to repeat the important parts consistently and develop enough judgment to know what to do when the normal process does not give them an easy answer.

We also want people who are comfortable being influential. Recruiting is not simply passing information between a candidate and a company. A good recruiter develops an opinion. They tell people what they think. They ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions, and occasionally get somebody to do something they were not planning to do when the conversation started. There should be some enjoyment in that challenge.

And then the next morning, they have to get up and do the repetitive work again.

That is probably the part of recruiting that is hardest to understand until you have done it for a while. The exciting moments are real, but they sit on top of a lot of ordinary work. The people who last tend to find enough satisfaction in the parts of the job that fit them naturally while developing the discipline to handle the parts that do not.

That is ultimately why the CVI has remained useful to us. It does not tell us whether somebody can succeed here. It helps us understand what success is probably going to ask of them.