Case Study: Leading Indian food company improves front-line sales hiring to 29% with Mercer Mettl's role-specific competency assessments

A scientific methodology to quantify role specific competencies for better hiring decisions

Leading Food Company, a major Indian FMCG with over Rs. 6,000 crores in revenue and products sold through 3.5 million retail outlets, needed a scientific, role-specific way to improve hiring of front-line sales executives and to correlate candidate knowledge with on-the-job performance. To meet this need the company engaged Mercer Mettl to develop a customized assessment approach for the FMCG Sales workforce.

Mercer Mettl mapped a competency framework to its assessment suite — Mettl Personality Profiler, Mettl Motivation Inventory, Situational Judgement Questions, and the Mettl Cognitive and Domain Assessment Battery — curated custom content, validated it with leadership, benchmarked and predictively validated against 580 employees, piloted, and then assessed ~300 Area Sales Executive candidates. Mercer Mettl’s solution tightened selection criteria and improved the hiring ratio to 29%, produced 30 candidates who cleared all competency benchmarks (50% met overall benchmarks), and enabled creation of a “Hero Profile” for future hires.