Most founders hiring their first SDR are flying blind. You post the role, 80 applications land in your inbox, and now you are supposed to evaluate a skill you have never done professionally. This is the exact process we run for companies from pre-seed to $100M in revenue, broken down stage by stage: how to get from 50 applicants to one signed offer without wasting three months or losing your top pick to a competing offer. If you are a founder or early-stage exec building your first GTM motion, this is the playbook.
Most founders hiring their first SDR are flying blind. You post the role, 80 applications land in your inbox, and now you are supposed to evaluate a skill you have never done professionally. This is the exact process we run for companies from pre-seed to $100M in revenue, broken down stage by stage: how to get from 50 applicants to one signed offer without wasting three months or losing your top pick to a competing offer. If you are a founder or early-stage exec building your first GTM motion, this is the playbook.
An SDR is a Sales Development Representative: the rep who finds and qualifies new prospects and books meetings for your closers. It is the first sales hire most founders make, and it is the one they are least equipped to evaluate, because hiring an SDR requires judging a craft most founders have never done for a living.
The cost of getting it wrong is not theoretical. Sales development is one of the highest-turnover functions in B2B, with median tenure well under two years across the industry, and The Bridge Group's SDR metrics research has tracked attrition, ramp, and quota data on this role since 2007. At a 15-person company, one bad SDR hire is not a rounding error. It is six months of base salary, a founder back on the phones, and a pipeline that never materialized.
The other half of the problem is that you are not the only one evaluating. Your top candidate is in process with three other companies. Most founders lose their number one pick to a slower decision, not a worse offer. We covered the offer side of this in depth in What Every Company Gets Wrong About Sales Hiring. This post covers the process itself.
Do not try to get to three. Get to 10 to 15.
If this is your first time hiring, expect roughly a third of your pipeline to fall off before the final round. They take other offers, they ghost, they self-select out. Whittle 50 down to 10 people and you will end up with four, and you will start compromising out of scarcity. Hiring two or three SDRs? Scale accordingly. Three SDRs means seven to nine finalists, not three.
Here is what actually earns a spot in that 15.
Anyone who reaches out to you directly moves to the top of the pile. Most applicants do not do this. If 10% of your applicants send you a direct message, read every single one. The ask is not that you blindly advance them. It is that you look. An SDR's entire job is finding the right person and getting a response. Someone who found your contact info, understood the tools well enough to do it, and sent something that was not generic has already demonstrated the job.
Resume non-starters are real. Typos. Obvious unedited AI output. Nobody cares that you used AI to save time. They care that you did not clean it up. If a candidate will not proof a document that determines their next job, they will not proof a prospecting email either.
Look for evidence they went deep on something. Not industry expertise necessarily. Depth. A good university. State championship or D1 level athletics. All-American. Military. A real accomplishment in a previous career. It does not have to be sales. What you are looking for is proof they have committed hard to something difficult and come out the other side, because that is what the first six months of an SDR job feels like.
Look for a clear reason they want this specific role. Not "I am open to sales." Why an SDR role, and why an SDR role at your company. If they are blanket-applying, it shows.
Get a mix of experienced and inexperienced candidates. It is very easy to fixate on hiring someone with a year or two of experience on the cheap because of layoffs. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you inherit habits you have to unwind, which is harder than training someone who has the intangibles from scratch. There is no clean answer. Just do not build a shortlist of only one type.
The real filter: who needs the least time to ramp? Everything above is a proxy for that one question.
If you have more than about 15 employees, you probably have a recruiter running this. If you do not, it is you. Either way, this call is 20 to 30 minutes and it is a sanity check, not an interrogation.
Three questions carry it:
Add one intangible question. "Tell me about a time you overcame adversity." Then probe their background lightly. You are not trying to break them here.
If you are scrappy and want to run two or three rounds instead of four, skip this and go straight to the manager interview. That is a legitimate call. Fewer rounds means less time to lose your top candidate.
This is where founders without a sales background get beaten, because you are interviewing people who talk for a living. They are better at real-time conversation than you are, and you do not know what to probe.
Here is the technique. Do not accept the first answer. Keep pulling.
A candidate says: "I hit 120% of my quota. Every day I do calls, emails, and LinkedIn touches, about a hundred each."
Sounds great. Now go deeper:
That last one sounds like trivia. It is not. If a rep is genuinely number one on the leaderboard, they are working against a clock. They know exactly when the quarter closes because it is the number they stare at. A candidate who claims 150% attainment and does not know their own fiscal calendar told you something.
What good depth actually sounds like. Here is Eric answering his own question, a decade removed from the role: "Every single morning without fail I went into the office at 8am and spent the first hour combing through inbound leads, organizing them, getting them into the right cadences, because those are way more qualified than outbound. From 9 to 10 I am actioning those leads. I prefer to send an email first so when I call in two or three hours, they might remember it. That lowers the barrier. Up until lunch I make dials and clean up Salesforce. I found cold calls from 2 to 3pm and 4:30 to 5:30pm in the prospect's time zone got the best connect rates."
That is not the golden answer. Your candidate does not have to match it. But that is the resolution you are listening for. If someone cannot describe their own process at that level, they are smoothing you.
If they have no sales experience, run the same play on a different subject. They were an athlete? "Talk me through a serious injury. What happened, how did you handle it?" Engineer? "Tell me about working with your biggest customer." You are not scoring the story. You are scoring the critical thinking, the specificity, and whether they can think under a follow-up.
Do not sleep on the questions they ask you. This is the single fastest read on effort. If they ask you the top 10 most-Googled tech sales interview questions, they did not prepare. If they spent three minutes on your LinkedIn and ask something like "I saw you were an AE and then moved into SDR management. I know that usually means a pay cut, why did you do that?" that is a candidate who cares. Two things are true at once: they researched you, and they made you feel good doing it. That is the job.
Bonus points for asking for reservations at the end. If a candidate closes the interview by asking whether you have any hesitations about them, that is standard practice for a trained rep. Not doing it will not disqualify anyone. It is worth about 25% of a grade.
Tip for non-sales founders: if you are stuck on what to probe, ask AI. "I am interviewing someone with an engineering background who wants to move into sales. What questions surface whether they actually knew what they were doing?" You do not need sales experience to ask a good follow-up. You need one.
This is the round that predicts performance. Everything before it predicts polish.
How to build it. Use a real deal you have closed. Pull the actual personas who were involved. Do not invent a scenario with an ICP you do not sell to, because then you are testing something that has nothing to do with the job. If your product is deeply technical, add enough context that a candidate without a software background is not dead on arrival. You are testing judgment, not domain trivia.
How to run it. Send the write-up when they pass the manager round. Give them up to a week. Require the email submitted at least 24 hours before the interview so you can read it beforehand, even for five minutes.
We combine the email and the cold call into one 45-minute session and target the same person in both. Some companies split them into two rounds. Combining is faster, and speed is a weapon here.
The 45 minutes:
What to ask on the email. How did you find these three people? Why these people and not others? Why did you structure the email this way? Then throw a curveball: "This is good. What if they do not respond? What is the next touch?" You are watching them think in real time.
What you are actually grading. Not correctness. Effort and reasoning. Did they use the template you sent, or fire back a bare email? Did they write up their process? Can they explain why they targeted that specific person?
That last question is the tell. A candidate can run your exercise through Claude or ChatGPT and get a solid output. That is fine. Where they fall apart is "why this person." If the reasoning is not theirs, there is no reasoning underneath it.
If a candidate misses by 20% but has a strong thought process and takes feedback, that gap is coachable. If they nail the output and cannot explain a single decision, that is not.
The cold call role play. You play the prospect. They play your SDR trying to book a meeting. Two things are being tested: how much they prepared, and how they handle a moment they cannot prepare for.
Do not be nice. Give them a real wall. Something like: "We looked at Kafka a while back for our Kubernetes deployment across the EU and New Zealand and had real problems with our globally distributed architecture. How do you fit into that?"
That is an intentionally brutal question. No SDR knows the answer. Half your engineers do not know the answer. That is the point. What you want to see is whether they can survive not knowing:
That is the move. Take the thing you cannot answer and make it the reason for the meeting. A candidate with no experience will not know to do that. Do not penalize them for it. Penalize the freeze.
If they are trying, they are 75% of the way there. The mechanics are coachable. Composure is not. Once they are in seat, the 90-day ramp plan is where you close the rest of the gap.
By now you should be at three candidates. Five to seven went into the exercise. Three come out.
Run this within a week of the exercise. Every extra day is risk. Your top pick is in final rounds elsewhere.
This round is usually a founder at a small company, or a director or VP at a larger one. It is not another exercise. It is a pressure check and a culture check, and it should include a curveball, because if you run the exact playbook every founder reads on LinkedIn, the prepared candidate has already rehearsed it.
If you are early stage, test for ambiguity:
Work or non-work both count. Ideally some of both. You need someone who can be told "figure this out, we will optimize it later" and not stall.
If you are more mature, test for process: how did you optimize something? How did you prepare for the thing you won? How did you handle your biggest customers? That is structured, procedural thinking, and it is what a company with hundreds of employees actually needs.
Ask the 2 to 5 year question. Not because anyone can predict it. Because the answer shows whether they understand what they are signing up for. "I just want to be the best SDR possible" is a non-answer. What you want sounds like: "18 to 24 months as a top-performing SDR, promoted to AE, then closing. Ideally I move into a different segment from there. Obviously I cannot predict it, but that is the path."
That answer tells you they researched the internal structure. Which means they know that in month three they will pick up the phone and get told to go away, and they will not quit when it happens.
The experience versus intangibles tradeoff. You will often have a candidate with a year or two of experience next to a candidate with none who badly wants it. Real considerations on both sides:
That last one is uncomfortable but it is real. Weigh it.
This is where most founders lose. Not on process. On speed.
We have watched companies drag their feet on a strong finalist because they assumed the candidate would wait. They do not. You lose one, you lose two, and now you are extending an offer to your third pick. Not a bad hire necessarily. But you did not win, you settled.
Rank them the day you finish the final round. Not in three to five days. One, two, three.
Play out the slow version. You take five days to decide. Number one has an offer from Snowflake by then. You go to number two on day seven, and in the meantime they picked up two other final rounds. Now you are at number three and you never had a chance at your first choice.
How to close. Pick up the phone. Do not lead with an email. Confirm the start date, give the offer verbally, and if you get a verbal yes, send the offer letter the same day. Make it contingent on signature within 24 to 48 hours, especially if you have other finalists waiting. Ask for an answer in two days. That is a reasonable ask and it does not read as pressure.
Do not tell your other finalists no yet. We have seen companies extend an offer, assume it is signed, and clear the rest of the pipeline. Then the offer falls through and you cannot un-ring that bell. Keep your two and three warm until ink is on paper.
How to choose between three strong finalists. Honestly? Gut. You have done the heavy lifting already. If three people all cleared the exercise, all handled the final round, all fit, then it comes down to who you have the best read on and who you would want on the team. Not who can do the job. Who you would enjoy working with, and who is coachable. That is not a soft criterion at an early-stage company. It is the whole thing.
If you genuinely do not have a fit, it is okay to pause. Do not force a hire. It is also not okay to sit in process for six months. Read the market.
And stay flexible. Some of the best hires we have seen came in late, got fast-tracked straight to the exercise, crushed it, and turned into top performers. The process above is the ideal scenario where everyone shows up at the same time. Nothing is ever ideal. You can skip a step for the right person.
Top performers negotiate. Every time. Plan for it.
Be transparent about OTE on the first call. OTE is on-target earnings: base plus commission at 100% of quota. Say the number plainly: "Our comp is 50,000 base, 30,000 commission, 80,000 OTE." If a candidate gets weird about it or has no answer, that is information. If you do not negotiate, say that too, clearly and without hardballing: "80K firm, that is standard for this role here."
What the negotiation will sound like. This is exactly how we coach reps, and we have trained over 9,000 of them, so expect it: "Hey, I really appreciate the offer. Let me take those two days, I will get you an answer by Friday." Then Friday: "I am in final round somewhere else and they are coming in higher. I really like your company. If you can meet me at 90K, 55 base and 35 variable, I am ready to sign today."
Do the math before you react. That is 5,000 more base. Less than $500 a month to secure your first choice on a hire you just spent six weeks selecting. Founders get weirded out by this and lose their top pick over a rounding error.
Read the shape of the ask, not just the number. A rep asking for more base and more variable is betting on themselves. That is exactly the profile you want. A rep who wants more base and does not care about variable is telling you they do not think they will hit the number. That one is worth a second look.
If you have never hired a sales role before, understand that negotiating carries no stigma here. It is the opposite. Some companies build their OTE assuming the candidate will come back, because a rep who does not negotiate is a red flag in a role where negotiating is the job. When someone negotiates with you, you did not get a difficult candidate. You got a good one.
If you are hiring SDRs and want help, this is exactly what we do at Higher Levels. We build and run this process for companies from pre-seed to $100M in revenue, and we connect companies directly with vetted talent from our network of 9,000+ trained reps. Most of the founders we work with are not struggling with the process. They are struggling to get good candidates to knock on the door in the first place.
Book time with our team about hiring SDRs. Top sales talent, already vetted, in 14 days or less.
Last updated: July 2026
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