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Eight questions to ask business development job candidates From the number of inquiries I receive, there is an ever-increasing demand for qualified government contractor business developers. Unfortunately, predicting which candidate will succeed at your company is extremely difficult. Here are eight interview questions that might help. Describe a standard business development process including the key roles. Give a specific example of how you successfully identified, qualified and then supported a bid through contract award. What is the key information you need to gather to develop a viable, qualified opportunity? Which government agencies have you had success selling to? How much time do you spend at your desk versus meeting with prospects and teaming partners? How you would spend your first90 days in your new job? What factors do you believe should drive a bid versus no bid decision? What is the optimal way for business development to work with operations?
What attracted you to this role
What do you think makes a good salesperson
What do you enjoy most/least about teamwork
Give an example of a time when you had to sell an unpopular idea to someone
How would you identify a new market to enter
Why do you enjoy business development
What motivates you in your work
Describe a situation in the past where you’ve had to improvise
1. Can you predict the business prospects of this business?
2.What compensation package (CTC) you expect and how you will effectively compensate this CTC in return?
3.Can you identify certain areas which find excellent prospects ?
4.Please describe why you think so any one of the mentioned field?
5.What are the risks you foresee about this business?
6.How happily you are approaching us for this job?
7.What is the main concern and disadvantage for a Government Project.?
8.In how many days you will be able to full stream on this job?
I strongly agree with the suggested questions provided by both Mr. Vinod and Mr. Venkitaraman. Ultimately we will focus our questions to collect the contact KPIs against which we will measure the performance of the new candidate. Also do they have an effective risk management framework? what are their efforts to comply with laws an regulation, do they manage acompliance function formally.
As there can be repetition of questions by other participants, i have segregated the question into some segments as follows:
1. Behavioural
2. Interpersonal
3. Creative Thinking
4. General Knowledge
5. Managerial Ability
6. Functional Ability
7. Productivity Based
8. Problem Solving Ability
As the other necessary details have been already screened from the C.V, We need to understand the above mentioned abilities to gauge the candidate for the business development role.
Agreed with previous answers, good sharing knowledge for me. Thank you.
agree with Divyesh Patel ,VENKITARAMAN KRISHNA MOORTHY VRINDAVAN
I agree with all the answers
Business Development as a job has a very broad reach. It can not be contained in8 parameters much more8 questions for a strong candidate. For a regular so-so candidate maybe8 questions can be used as a gauge in order to gain entry or qualify a short list. But for a strong candidate, I feel that a free flowing dialogue or conversation will be a better approach
By engaging a strong candidate to a dialogue where he or she can share idea, position, walk-away view and other open ended opinions on the product and the market, the interviewer can have a deeper and more vivid view of the candidate's qualification. Not to mention that a candidate's sense of conviction is better expressed in two way dialogue rather that one way Q&A.
Thanks for the invitation
Agreed with the8 points given by
Mr.:Patel & Mr.:Vrindavan as well too
We have first to define where Business Development stops and Sales/Commercial starts.
In some organization the two are conjoint in some other are not.
I personally prefer the two functions to be conjoint. In the engineering-construction business the business development/sales function is often together and they team up with commercial & proposal to take the opportunity to, hopefully a successful end.
The reason I prefer this solution is that having constant pulse of the market and customer is something that cannot be improvised in the time frame of a bid.
However coming back to the initial question I would forget about paper work or certificates; I need the following qualities that can only be assessed by a face to face interview (assuming the interviewer has some clues of what the candidate is talking about and this means I need a business developer to attend, they recognize their own breed):
- Self motivating capabilities,
- Creativity,
- General knowledge of the business, but not in too much detail to be a technical sales,
- How he behave and present himself at the interview, business developers need to be likable to customers, a stiff "jacket and tie" individual should study law,
- Realistic without being negative and a dreamer without being foolish,
- Responsiveness to challenges
- Sense of humor
- Muti-cultural adaptability,
- Casual scenario reaction, talk openly at what the company is trying to achieve and see the comments, the approach, the proposition.
This should be enough.
