The SDR role has changed more than any other seat in the revenue team. A competent tool can now write a passable prospecting email in seconds, which means the things that used to differentiate a good SDR — writing speed, activity volume, template quality — differentiate almost nobody.
What is left is research judgement, conversation quality and persistence. Those are harder to interview for, so most processes quietly test the old things instead.
Stop scoring activity numbers
"I made 90 calls a day" tells you about a previous manager's dashboard, not about the candidate. Ask instead:
- How did you decide which accounts to work this week?
- What made you skip an account that looked like a fit on paper?
- What signal do you look for that tells you now is the right time to reach out?
You are listening for a repeatable method with some judgement in it. A candidate who describes prioritisation, even imperfectly, is thinking. A candidate who describes volume is executing someone else's plan.
Test the conversation, because that is the job
Booking a meeting requires speaking to a person who did not plan to speak to you. Test it directly. Give the candidate a short brief and a realistic persona, then run a live five-minute cold conversation with someone from your team who will be a bit unhelpful.
Score:
- The opening. Did they earn the next thirty seconds?
- Recovery. What happened after the first brush-off?
- Curiosity. Did they ask anything they could not have found online?
- Listening. Did the conversation change direction based on an answer?
- The close. Did they actually ask for the next step?
Brief them properly beforehand. You are testing preparation and conversation, not their tolerance for ambush.
Ask about the technology honestly
The useful questions are about judgement, not tooling.
- Show me how you would research this account in ten minutes. What would you look for, and what would you ignore?
- Where has AI made your outreach worse, and what did you stop doing?
- What part of your follow-up do you refuse to automate, and why?
Good candidates have opinions here. They have tried things, watched reply rates fall, and pulled back. Weak candidates talk about how much more they can now send.
Ask for a piece of writing
One short outbound message to a real, named prospect in your market, written after the interview, with an hour to prepare. Look for whether it says something specific about that business, whether it sounds like a person, and whether it asks for something reasonable. This one exercise separates candidates faster than any other stage.
Then look at mindset
The SDR job is mostly rejection. Ask what they do after a bad morning, what they changed after their worst month, and what they want to be doing in two years. An SDR who wants to be an AE is not a problem — it is the normal path — but you should know it and be honest about whether that route exists with you.
What to weight
For an early-career SDR, weight coachability and curiosity above everything on the CV. Experience matters far less in this seat than in any other, and the difference between an SDR who improves weekly and one who plateaus at month three is visible in the interview if you test for it.