SDR Hiring Playbook: Find Candidates Who Generate Pipeline

The SDR role is one of the highest-leverage positions in your revenue org. Get it right, and you have a pipeline engine. Get it consistently right, and you have a culture of performance that feeds your AE team for years.

Getting it right starts with how you hire.

Most companies use an SDR interview process built around availability and articulation. This post walks through a better approach: one focused on the traits that actually predict performance, with specific questions and exercises to surface them.

What Actually Predicts SDR Success

After placing SDR candidates across industries and tracking their performance, five traits consistently separate top performers from the rest.

1. Competitive Drive

The best SDRs want to win. They track their performance against peers. They're motivated by leaderboards, recognition, and proving themselves.

Good SDR hiring questions:

• "Tell me about a time you competed for something meaningful to you. What drove you? How did you measure progress?"
• "When have you been on a team where some people weren't pulling their weight? How did it make you feel? What did you do?"
• "How do you respond when you're ranked last in your peer group?"

Listen for intrinsic motivation to win, not just extrinsic rewards. The best SDRs compete against themselves first, peers second.

2. Resilience and Rejection Tolerance

SDRs hear "no" dozens of times per day. The ones who succeed don't take rejection personally. They move on quickly and keep dialing.

Good SDR hiring questions:

• "Tell me about the most significant rejection or failure you've experienced. How did you process it? What did you do the next day?"
• "Describe a time when you faced consistent rejection or failure over weeks or months. How did you maintain motivation?"
• "How do you talk to yourself after a bad day?"

Listen for quick recovery, learning from feedback, and sustained motivation despite setbacks.

3. Coachability

The best SDRs actively seek feedback, implement coaching, and continuously improve.

Good SDR hiring questions:

• "Tell me about the best coach or manager you've had. What made them effective? How did you apply their feedback?"
• "Describe a time when critical feedback changed your approach or behavior. What was the feedback? How did you receive it? What changed?"
• "When have you resisted feedback and later realized you should have listened? What happened?"

Listen for humility, a growth mindset, and specific examples of behavior change based on input.

4. Curiosity and Business Acumen

Great SDRs understand what they're selling, why it matters, and how it solves customer problems. They ask smart questions and actually listen to prospect responses.

Good SDR hiring questions:

• "Walk me through how you'd prepare for your first day as an SDR here. What would you research? What questions would you ask?"
• "Tell me about a product or service you've used and loved. Why did you choose it? What problem did it solve? What alternatives did you consider?"
• "If I asked you to sell [your company's product] to me right now based on what you know from this interview, where would you start?"

Listen for genuine curiosity and the ability to connect product features to customer problems.

5. Work Ethic and Discipline

SDR work is repetitive and requires consistent daily activity. Great SDRs show up, do the work, and maintain activity levels even when they don't feel like it.

Good SDR hiring questions:

• "Tell me about the most grinding, repetitive work you've done. How did you maintain quality and consistency?"
• "Describe your daily routine. How do you structure your time? What systems or habits keep you productive?"
• "When have you had to do work that was boring or unfulfilling but necessary? How did you motivate yourself?"

Listen for systems thinking, self-discipline, and the ability to execute consistently without constant supervision.

Interview Patterns Worth Rethinking

A few common interview approaches work against you when hiring SDRs. Here's where teams often leave performance on the table.

Interviewing for Likability Over Drive

Friendly and articulate matters. But it doesn't predict whether someone will make 60 calls on a Tuesday with a full inbox and two no-shows. Structured behavioral interviews focused on competitive drive, resilience, and coachability give you better signal than overall impression. Score answers based on specific evidence.

Skipping the Sales Skills Assessment

You can't evaluate SDR capability through conversation alone. Include role-play exercises in every interview:

• "I'm a prospect. You have 30 seconds to leave me a voicemail. Go."
• "Cold call me right now and try to book a meeting."
• "I just said 'I'm not interested.' What do you say next?"

Watch for how they recover from objections, their tonality, and their ability to think on their feet.

Not Clarifying Career Motivation

Many SDR candidates view the role as a stepping stone. That's fine — but candidates not committed to being great SDRs will disengage quickly. Clarify motivation explicitly:

• "Why SDR specifically, not other sales roles?"
• "What does success look like in the first 12 months?"
• "When you picture yourself in 18 months, what do you want to have accomplished?"

Overlooking Technical and Tool Proficiency

AI is reshaping prospecting workflows — sequencing, scoring, and personalization. Modern SDRs need to leverage AI-powered tools effectively. AI sales and marketing roles exhibit a 33% talent shortage, reflecting how hard it is to find sales talent that can work with AI-enabled platforms.

Assess technical aptitude directly:

• "What sales tools have you used? Walk me through your workflow in [tool]."
• "How would you use AI to personalize outreach at scale?"
• "Tell me about a time you learned a new technical tool quickly. How did you approach it?"

A Better SDR Hiring Process

Here's what high-performing SDR hiring looks like end to end.

Step 1: Define Success Metrics First

Before hiring, define activity expectations (calls, emails, LinkedIn messages per day), conversion metrics (connect rate, meeting rate, opportunity rate), pipeline targets, and ramp timeline. This clarifies what "good" looks like and helps you assess candidate fit before a single interview.

Step 2: Source for Competitive Backgrounds

Great SDRs often come from college athletics, military service, competitive extracurriculars, and customer-facing roles like retail or hospitality. Prior SDR experience isn't a requirement. Competitive drive and resilience are.

Step 3: Use Structured Behavioral Interviews

Build a scorecard with the five success traits above. Ask 2-3 behavioral questions per trait. Score candidates on specific evidence, not gut feeling. This removes bias and improves consistency across your hiring team.

Step 4: Include Sales Role-Play

Every SDR interview should include a cold-call exercise, an objection-handling scenario, and an email-writing test. Watch for natural sales instincts: recovery from rejection, tonality, persistence, and quick thinking.

Step 5: Assess Cultural and Career Fit

Great SDRs thrive in environments with clear metrics, regular coaching, recognition and competition, and visible career progression. Ensure your environment aligns with what motivates the candidate.

Step 6: Check References with Specific Questions

Ask references how the candidate responded to rejection or difficult feedback, how competitive they were relative to peers, how coachable they were, and whether they'd hire them again for an SDR role. Specific feedback on SDR-relevant traits is what you're after.

The SDR Talent Landscape in 2026

A few trends reshaping SDR hiring right now:

AI-Powered Prospecting: Tools like Clay, Apollo, and AI-powered sequencing platforms are changing how SDRs work. The best candidates can use these tools to personalize outreach at scale. Assessing technical aptitude during hiring is increasingly important.

Specialization: Companies are moving toward enterprise SDRs, vertical-specific SDRs, and partner SDRs. Hiring for specialized roles requires assessing relevant domain knowledge, not just general sales aptitude.

Career Pathing: Top SDR candidates evaluate opportunities based on promotion timelines and skill development. A clear path to AE, account management, sales operations, or enablement is a competitive advantage in attracting strong candidates.

On-demand recruiting gives revenue leaders the ability to stand up or right-size SDR teams quickly in response to GTM changes, product launches, or territory expansion — particularly valuable given typical SDR turnover rates.

Building a High-Performing SDR Team

The good news: companies that apply rigorous behavioral interviewing and role-play assessment consistently see stronger SDR performance and lower early-stage turnover. The process above isn't complicated. It's just more intentional than most.

Assess competitive drive, resilience, and coachability explicitly. Use structured behavioral interviews with scorecards. Include role-play in every conversation. Define what success looks like before the first candidate walks in.

The SDRs are out there. The hiring process is where you find them.

Talk to an SDR recruiting specialist: Schedule a consultation to discuss building a stronger SDR hiring process.

Explore SDR recruiting services: Learn about IQTalent's approach to SDR recruiting.