We Ran a Real 'Senior AE' Job Post Through a Competency Rubric. It Named Twelve Skills and Verified Zero.
The requirements section reads like a skills framework. The interview process behind it tests tenure, references, and a single roleplay. Here's the gap, line by line.
A Senior AE requisition landed on my desk last month. Real company, details anonymised and a couple of edges sanded down so nobody gets a call from their GC, but the shape is exact — I've seen forty postings built the same way. The requirements section ran to fourteen bullets. Twelve of them were named, checkable sales competencies, not fluff: discovery-led selling, objection handling, negotiation and deal structuring, multi-threading across a buying committee, forecasting accuracy, territory and pipeline management, executive presence, MEDDIC-style qualification discipline, cross-functional collaboration with CS and product, coaching junior reps, value-narrative storytelling, competitive positioning.
Then I read the interview process sitting behind it. Recruiter screen. One hiring-manager call. A single twenty-minute roleplay. Two reference checks. An offer.
Twelve named skills. One roleplay. I ran the actual coverage, and it isn't close.
The posting versus the process
Here's what happened to each of the twelve, mapped against the stage that was supposed to test it.
| Skill named in the JD | Where it's tested in the real process | Verified against a defined bar? |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery-led selling | 20-minute roleplay | No — graded on impression, not behaviour |
| Objection handling | Same roleplay | No — same |
| Competitive positioning | Sometimes, if the interviewer improvises a question | No |
| Negotiation & deal structuring | Not tested | Inferred from a CV line: "closed £1.4m in FY25" |
| Multi-threading / stakeholder mapping | Not tested | Inferred from job title: "Enterprise AE" |
| Forecasting accuracy | Not tested | Inferred from "consistently 110%+ of quota" |
| Territory & pipeline management | Not tested | Inferred from five years' tenure |
| Executive presence | Not tested | Inferred from "sold to VP and C-suite buyers" |
| MEDDIC-style qualification discipline | Not tested | Self-reported certification, unverified |
| Cross-functional collaboration | Not tested | General impression from reference call |
| Coaching junior reps | Not tested | General impression from reference call |
| Value-narrative storytelling | Sometimes, if a case-study slide is requested | No rubric applied |
Nine of twelve never get near an assessment. They ride in on the CV and come out the other side "verified" only because nobody flagged the gap between claim and test.
What "tested" turns out to mean
The three that do get touched — discovery, objections, sometimes positioning — all live inside the same twenty-minute roleplay. I've sat in on these. A typical exchange goes:
Interviewer: "Pretend I'm a VP of Ops and I've said your price is too high. Go."
Candidate: "Totally understand — a lot of clients feel that way at first. Can I ask, when you say too high, is that versus budget, or versus what you've seen from other vendors?"
That's a reasonable opening question. Here's the problem: the interviewer's note afterwards reads "confident, asked good questions, handled pressure well." Not "asked one open clarifying question before making any concession; did not yet probe for the actual constraint behind the objection; did not test whether the objection was a stalling tactic." The behaviour was witnessed. It was never scored against a defined bar for what "good" objection handling looks like at this level. There's no pass line, no named sub-skills, no second observer, no comparison against how the last five candidates handled the identical scenario.
Witnessed is not verified. That distinction is the whole article. Swap "confident" for "articulate," "sharp," "good energy," "clearly experienced" — it's the same failure mode in different adjectives. An impression isn't a competency measurement, and writing it up in a debrief doc doesn't make it one.
Where the other nine skills actually came from
Everything the roleplay never touches gets backed into via three proxies, none of which measure the named skill:
- Tenure as a stand-in for competence. Five years as an AE reads as five years of accumulating negotiation skill, multi-threading skill, forecasting discipline. It might. It might also be five years of an inherited book of warm accounts, a generous comp plan, and a market that was easy to sell into. Tenure measures survival in a role, not mastery of what the role requires.
- Attainment as a stand-in for the underlying skill. "110% of quota" is an outcome. It's produced by territory quality, product-market fit, marketing-sourced pipeline, team support, and skill — in some unknown ratio. Citing it as evidence of forecasting accuracy or deal structuring is like citing a team's win rate as evidence of one player's tackling technique.
- The reference call as a character reference, not a skills reference. "Great to work with, hit the number, good team player" tells you about likeability and outcome. It almost never tells you whether the candidate can run a structured multi-threading play against a buying committee with three blockers in it, because the referee — usually a former manager — was never asked the question in those terms.
None of the three proxies verifies anything on the list. They're confident enough to feel like verification, which is worse than admitting the gap outright.
Why this keeps happening
Nobody owns the mismatch. Recruiting or the hiring manager writes the JD, usually by editing the last posting or lifting language from a competitor's listing — which is how skill lists grow across hiring cycles without anyone checking they're still testable. The interview process, meanwhile, stays cheap and static: one roleplay is already more structure than most companies bother with, so it becomes "the assessment" by default, regardless of how many skills the JD has since accumulated. Two different people own two different documents, and neither checks that one maps to the other.
The cost shows up ninety days in, exactly where you'd predict. A manager told me, three months after a "strong hire": "Her discovery is genuinely good — that's what came through in the interview. But she can't get past a single champion to save her life, and her forecast has missed two months running." That's not bad luck. That's a JD naming multi-threading and forecasting as requirements, and an interview process that never once looked at either.
What verification actually requires
It isn't complicated, it's just more deliberate than one roleplay covering twelve claims. Each named skill needs an observable behaviour and a bar: not "handles objections well" but "reframes at least one price objection without leading with a discount, in a two-round scenario, scored against a defined rubric." Not "forecasting accuracy" as a CV bullet but a structured case study where the candidate walks a real (anonymised) pipeline and defends their commit number under questioning.
If you're rebuilding a hiring process from scratch rather than patching one roleplay, End-to-End Sales Hiring Process Checklist is the fastest way to see where the gaps sit before you write the next posting. And if you want the twelve-skill sprawl turned into something a panel can actually score against, AE, SDR & CSM Competency Framework is the version of a rubric I'd want sitting next to the JD, not filed away as a separate document nobody opens until the hire has already gone sideways.
The honest fix for most Senior AE postings isn't more requirements. It's fewer, each one paired with a stage that actually tests it — which usually means admitting the posting currently promises an assessment that was never built.