“The effect of recruitment and selection on salesperson performance of a vehicle manufacturing company in Nigeria”

Organizations should equip human resources and sales managers with the vital information and knowledge needed to recruit and select salespersons with the required qualities to help them achieve improved sales performance. This paper aims to determine a salesperson’s educational qualification, selling experience, and persuasive ability and their effect on the salesperson’s performance at Innoson Motors Manufacturing Company Ltd. The study surveyed 131 company staff to collect the data; only 120 questionnaires were correctly filled and returned. First, the study checked the instru-ment’s reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.982). Data were then analyzed using a simple linear regression analysis. The findings revealed that salesperson educational qualification has a significant positive effect on salesperson performance (r = 0.944; t = 54.251; F = 2943.209; p < 0.05). Next, salesperson selling experience was found to have a significant positive effect on salesperson performance (r = 0.964; t = 68.905; F = 4747.922; p < 0.05). Finally, salesperson persuasive ability was found to have a significant positive effect on salesperson performance (r = 0.960; t = 64.812; F = 4200.634; p < 0.05). Hence, company managers can use the findings of this paper to understand that employing highly educated, experienced, and persuasive salespersons will lead to improved sales-person performance.


INTRODUCTION
Competition has risen tremendously in many industries; thus, the management of most organizations is looking for the best set of people to employ (Koponen et al., 2019).Indeed, organizations focus their interest on establishing and sustaining market leadership.The only way to achieve this is by recruiting salespersons with what it takes to acquire and retain profitable customers.Therefore, organizations are more interested in those salespersons with good company, customer, product, and service knowledge and experience capable of attracting more customers than competitors.
While many businesses employ salespersons without considering their selling skills and abilities, a few are beginning to employ salespersons with good selling qualities (Otoo et al., 2018).Salespersons with these qualities are better equipped to identify customer problems and expectations; they are more disposed to introduce innovative approaches that will satisfy customers by solving their problems.The satisfaction of clients' needs will result in repeated purchases and customer loyalty.Thus, as many customers embark on repurchase behavior and become loyal, salesperson performance will highly improve, and the company's goal will be achieved.Although the ultimate interest of many organizations is to make a profit and show high business performance, achieving it can be problematic.Jobber et al. (2019) remarked that excelling in selling jobs requires an organization's deliberate plan and commitment toward recruiting salespersons with the requisite traits such as personality, integrity, education background, experience, persuasiveness, intelligence, product and service knowledge, confidence, business acumen, adaptability, and communication skills.
Astonishingly, many organizations across the globe have recorded poor sales and business growth consequent to inadequate selling skills found in salespersons (Yi et al., 2021).In Nigeria, unemployment is so enormous that recruiting qualified salespersons with requisite selling traits and qualities has become difficult.Sadly, job seekers pay money to secure jobs in Nigeria (Olawoyin, 2021) notwithstanding whether they are qualified or not to perform those jobs.This has led to poor sales performance, poor overall business growth, and the failure of many businesses.
Organizations can only achieve high performance by investing their money in recruiting salespersons with the requisite selling qualities and traits.Salespeople must possess the required qualities to achieve and sustain a competitive business position by attaining unshakable sales performance.Hence, this study collates empirical facts to determine the crucial evaluation of a salesperson's educational qualification, experience, and persuasive ability to improve performance, in the example of a local automobile manufacturing company in Nigeria.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Selling has become a delicate and important phenomenon that needs special skill acquisition and development to enhance an organization's salesperson performance (Islam et al., 2016).This is because customer behavior is influenced by a salesperson's selling effort and acumen (Madhani, 2017).The effective management of the salespersons (Amoako & Okpattah, 2018) propagates a company's improved sales growth and superior performance through diligent recruitment and selection processes.Amoako and Okpattah (2018) also observed that it is difficult to manage salespersons that are poorly screened and selected to attain superior company performance.Recruiting and selecting experienced and sophisticated salespersons is a costly millennial investment.Companies that wish to survive must work hard to become a victor in the most competitive marketing environments (Okolo et al., 2016).
Hiring people to assign roles and tasks to them is known as recruitment.Uduji and Onwumere (2013) stated that recruitment entails assembling qualified applicants to acquire a job.Conversely, selection requires screening for the best-performed applicant based on the job's requisite qualification (Uduji & Nnabuko, 2008).Recruitment and selection are pertinent to the success of many organizations because meeting customer expectations depends on recruiting and selecting personnel who clearly understand who the customer is (Zeithaml et al., 2018).Indeed, a company's sales growth depends on the quality of its salespersons (Jobber et al., 2019).The job market is ironically highly saturated with millions of qualified graduates; hence, impressing recruiters by being different in a particular way is what it takes to be chosen as a more viable candidate (Amoako & Okpattah, 2018).Consequently, employers are looking for unique candidates with exceptional skills and talents who know their capabilities and how to leverage them to guarantee the company's success.Nonetheless, this study discusses tripartite recruitment and selection strategies such as salesperson educational qualification, selling experience, and persuasive ability to determine their effect on performance.

Salesperson educational qualification
Acquiring knowledge is vital as it profoundly affects salesperson performance.Koponen et al. (2019) showed that it takes about ten years to gain adequate sales knowledge to attain higher sales performance.In the life insurance industry, a fresh salesperson receives many intensive courses that offer the opportunity to connect and interact with different businesses, exposing a salesperson to the professional knowledge, skills, development, and experience required to successfully sell insurance services (Aqmala & Ardyan, 2019).In today's most competitive and dynamic manufacturing and services industries, educational qualification is one of the prerequisites or most fundamental qualities sought-after in the recruitment and selection of salespersons (Jobber et al., 2019).
Gone are the days when non-graduates are recruited to provide selling jobs for companies (Jobber et al., 2019 Moreover, when a salesperson possesses a robust selling experience, it indicates that he or she will gain more opportunities to communicate freely with many clients and gain tremendous knowledge and understanding about them, the products, and the services they deal with (Kavoosi et al., 2014).Ko and Dennis (2013) argued that a wide range of working experience would acquaint a salesperson with a deeper understanding of an organization and thus help them to study selling and marketing events as they unfold in the field.
In tourism, experience is significant because the more salespersons gain field experience, the more they get product and service knowledge and better serve their customers (Inyang, 2017).Terho et al. (2013) showed that salesperson performance has a positive relationship with salesperson experience.Salleh and Kamaruddin (2011) added that an experienced salesperson possesses more skill, producing more sales performance for a company.
Surprisingly, salesperson experience significantly affects the entire selling process, from prospecting up to follow-up (Abdolvand & Farzaneh, 2013).
Incidentally, a more experienced salesperson may quickly recover lost customers and become an effective and efficient training tool for the firm's junior salespersons focused on improving sales performance (Calixto & Ferreira, 2020).

Salesperson persuasive ability
Selling a company's products and services is undoubtedly within the purview of the salespersons.
To conduct this role effectively and efficiently, a salesperson has to be a good communicator.In the real sense, a salesperson must be an orator to communicate the language of the company, products, and services professionally.In the culture of salesmanship, a salesperson's appearance, voice, gestures, and entire body language need to be a conduit through which customers appreciate, accept, and purchase a product or service.Interestingly, the art and science of selling are not limited to exchanging physical products or intangible services; rather, it encompasses establishing relationships.
Persuading customers by getting along with them during selling is a compelling interpersonal skill salesperson adopt (Koponen et al., 2019).Persuasion occurs between the salesperson and the prospective customer whose interests are conflicted when actualizing sales (Huang, 2019).For effective and successful persuasion, a salesperson must adopt an adaptive selling approach to identify, customize, and satisfy various customer needs and wants (Huang, 2019).This is because persuasion douses selling tensions and uncertainties in a customer (Singh et al., 2017) 2018) remarked that organizational performance is improved by these resources and capabilities, which previously earned a competitive advantage for the firm.RBT strongly backs a positive relationship between organizational performance and its internal resource capabilities and competencies.Furthermore, it holds the view that an organization's success relies strongly on the viability of its workers (Davis & DeWitt, 2021).Thus, in this study, RBT is adopted as recruiting and selecting more qualified salespersons (human resources) based on educational qualification, experience, and persuasive ability will lead to more salesperson performance and higher competitive advantage for the company.

AIM AND HYPOTHESES
This paper aims to identify the major qualities or traits that can be found in a potential salesperson that would improve his or her performance when recruited by the sales manager to market the company's products and services.Thus, based on a rigorous review of contemporary studies, this paper considered four independent constructs -salesperson educational qualification, salesperson selling experience, and salesperson persuasive ability -to examine their effect on salesperson performance.Then, following the literature review, the hypotheses were put together: H1: Salesperson educational qualification has a significant positive effect on salesperson performance.
H2: Salesperson selling experience has a significant positive effect on salesperson performance.
H3: Salesperson persuasive ability has a significant positive effect on salesperson performance.

METHODOLOGY
The survey method of gathering primary data was adopted, and structured questionnaire copies were administered to the technical and administrative staff of

RESULTS
The data generated from the technical and administrative staff of Innoson Motors Manufacturing Company Ltd were presented using descriptive statistics and analyzed using simple linear regression.In addition, descriptive and inferential statistics were used for data analysis.
Table 1 shows that a total of 360 respondents indicated that they strongly agreed, and 234 showed that they agreed.73 respondents indicated neither agreement nor disagreement.Also, 37 revealed their disagreement, while 16 showed that they strongly disagreed.Thus, the results show that salesperson educational qualification significantly affects performance.

Testing hypothesis one
According to    Table 5 shows that a total of 388 respondents indicated that they strongly agreed, and 273 showed that they agreed.37 respondents indicated neither agreement nor disagreement.Also, 15 revealed their disagreement, while 7 showed that they strongly disagreed.This means that salesperson selling experience has a significant positive effect on performance.

Testing hypothesis two
According to Table 7, the residual sum of squares (14.349) is less than the regression sum of squares (190.306),indicating that the model does not explain more of the variation in the dependent variable.Due to chance, the variation explained by the model indicated that the significance value of the F statistics (0.000) is less than 0.05.Also, in Table 6, R is 0.964, indicating that salesperson selling experience significantly positively affects salesperson performance.Moreover, the difference in salesperson performance is explained by the model as shown by the R Square value of 93.0%.In the linear regression model, 0.20020, which is low, is the error of the estimate.Indeed, there is no autocorrelation, as indi-cated by the Durbin-Watson statistics value of 0.392, which is less than 2. Therefore, the salesperson's selling experience coefficient of 0.964 indicates a significant positive effect of salesperson selling experience on performance.In Table 8, a t-value of 68.905 is statistically significant.Therefore, the study accepts hypothesis two.
Table 9 shows that a total of 353 respondents indicated that they strongly agreed, and 304 showed that they agreed.39 respondents indicated neither agreement nor disagreement.Also, 16 revealed their disagreement, while 8 showed that they strongly disagreed.It means that salesperson persuasive ability has a significant positive effect on performance.possesses persuasive power, he or she will attract and retain more customers leading to improved salesperson performance.This is in line with Muzumdar et al. (2021), who asserted that a salesperson's ability to persuade a customer significantly improves a salesperson's performance.Similarly, Gadzhiyeva and Sager (2017) found an association between salesperson performance, ability to persuade, and power of language.Also, Punwatkar and Varghese (2014) stated that a salesperson with high persuasive ability could turn potential customers into actual customers, thereby increasing sales performance.In line with this, Ahmad and Akbar (2020) noted that salesperson performance has a significant positive relationship with selling adaptability.Abiaziem and Bako (2019) showed that salesperson persuasive ability affected customer retention in the banking industry.

CONCLUSION
This study aimed to determine the effect of a salesperson's educational qualification, selling experience, and persuasive ability on performance in an auto manufacturing company in Nigeria.Firstly, it was found that educational qualification has a significant positive effect on performance.It means that the performance will improve when sales managers recruit a salesperson with a higher education qualification.Similarly, the finding also showed that salesperson selling experience significantly positively affects salesperson performance.This will also signify that recruiting salespersons with past selling experience will attract higher performance than recruiting those without previous selling experience.The study also found that a salesperson's ability to persuade customers significantly positively affects performance.It indicates that the performance of salespersons with persuasive selling ability will improve when recruited, unlike recruiting without considering the persuasive traits found in the salespersons.Furthermore, a prospective salesperson who has previously performed selling with any manufacturing company will be seen as a better candidate for recruitment by the company.This is consequent to the fact that experience matters much in any interaction and relationship.Unarguably, a prospective salesperson with higher educational qualifications will be more crafty, creative, and adaptive to encourage customers to place their immediate demands for products and services.Moreover, the persuasive quality of a salesperson is leveraged toward breaking objection barriers focused on closing sales instantaneously with the customer's acceptance of the products.

Table 3 .
ANOVA a

Table 4 .
Coefficients a Note: a Dependent Variable: Salesperson Performance.

Table 5 .
Salesperson's selling experience and performance Source: Authors' elaboration.

Table 8 .
Coefficients a Note: a. Dependent Variable: Salesperson Performance.

Table 9 .
Salespersons' persuasive ability and performance

Table 10 .
Model summary b

Table 11 .
ANOVA a