Sales role-play assessments that show who can sell — before you make the offer.
Give every shortlisted candidate the same sales call, against an AI customer who pushes back like a real one, and get a scored report on how they actually sell — not how well they talk about selling. A pre-employment sales assessment your hiring managers can read in two minutes.
30-minute demo · bring a role you’re hiring for and we’ll build its assessment live
- Nothing for candidates to install
- Same call, same scorecard
- 28+ languages
- No recordings kept
Candidate 4 of 9 · Scored on discovery, objection handling, product knowledge and closing — the same scorecard as the other eight.
An interview tells you who’s good at interviews.
Sales and customer-facing hires get judged on the one thing an interview can’t show you: what happens when a real customer says no. Confident candidates talk well about their pipeline and freeze on the first objection. Quieter ones would handle it fine and never get the chance to prove it. So the decision rests on rapport and a CV, and you find out who can actually sell three months after the offer.
Structured interviews predicted job performance more than twice as well as unstructured ones (.42 vs .19) in the most comprehensive recent re-analysis of hiring research.
The validity of work-sample tests, where the candidate does a slice of the real job. Higher than general cognitive ability tests (.31) in the same analysis.
A Kollup assessment is a work sample run the structured way: the same call, the same customer and the same scorecard for every candidate on the shortlist.
Figures are mean operational validities from Sackett, Zhang, Berry & Lievens (2022), “Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11).
How the sales role-play assessment works
Three steps, set up by HR or the hiring manager in an afternoon. Nothing for the candidate to download and nothing for IT to approve.
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1
Build the call the job is about
Pick the conversation the new hire will have most — the inbound lead who went quiet, the renewal about to cancel, the prospect who says “just send me an email”. Set the customer’s mood, objections, product and language, and choose what the scorecard should weight most for this role.
HR or hiring manager · 5 minutes -
2
The candidate takes the call
Invite them onto a seat. They open Kollup in the browser, allow the microphone once, and they’re on a call with a customer who stays in character, pushes back and hangs up if they talk over it. They only see the scenario you assigned.
Candidate · until the customer hangs up -
3
The report lands, the seat moves on
Seconds later: an overall score, four sub-scores, what they did well and the one thing to change — quoting their own words, with the transcript attached. Share it with the hiring manager, then reassign the seat to the next candidate on the list.
Automatic · seconds after the call
Same customer, same objections, same scorecard. Every candidate.
A traditional sales role-play interview depends on who plays the customer that day and how hard they push. Kollup takes that variation out, so the difference between two candidates is the candidates.
- One scenario per role. Every candidate for the job meets the identical customer, objections and product detail — no interviewer going easy on the fourth candidate of a long afternoon.
- Four scores that mean the same thing each time. Discovery, objection handling, product knowledge and closing, weighted to what this role needs through the scenario’s focus areas.
- Evidence, not impressions. Every score comes with the candidate’s own words and the full transcript, so the panel debates what was said rather than how it felt.
- Your next interview question, written for you. The report’s “fix this next” point is the moment to probe at interview — and a quick read on how the candidate takes feedback.
- Easy to hand to the hiring manager. Share a read-only report link or save it as a PDF for the candidate file. Links can be revoked whenever you like.
Inbound lead follow-up — “not buying this quarter”
SDR shortlist · candidate 4 of 9 · 4 min 48 s
Strong open — you asked why he downloaded the guide instead of pitching. But when he said “just send me an email”, you agreed and ended the call. Ask what the email would need to answer, and book the next step around it.
Built for sales and customer-facing hiring
Any role where the job is a conversation with something to win — a meeting, a sale, a renewal, a payment. If you can describe the hardest call a new hire makes in their first month, you can assess candidates on it.
SDRs, BDRs & inside sales reps
Cold and warm outbound, inbound lead follow-up, booking the meeting. See who asks a second question before they pitch — and who folds at “we already have a supplier”.
- Cold call
- Inbound lead follow-up
- Getting past the gatekeeper
- Booking the meeting
Account executives & account managers
Discovery calls, pricing conversations, upsell and renewal. Hear how a senior candidate handles a budget objection before you’re negotiating their package.
- Discovery call
- “It’s too expensive”
- Renewal at risk
- Upsell
Call centre, retention & collections agents
Volume hiring where every recruiter is running a dozen phone screens a day. Put the shortlist through a short assessment call first, and spend interview time on people who can already hold one.
- Outbound sales
- Save & retention
- Collections outreach
- Appointment setting
Hiring for a specific industry? See how Kollup works for FOREX, iGaming, insurance and real estate sales teams. It isn’t built for pure inbound service roles — password resets and order-status queues aren’t what it scores well, and we’d rather say so up front.
The call they were hired on is the first one they practise.
Most pre-employment tests stop at the offer letter. Kollup is a sales training platform first, so the new hire keeps using it from day one — and HR and L&D can watch the ramp happen instead of waiting for the first quarter’s numbers.
Onboarding that starts where the assessment ended
The scenario a new hire was assessed on becomes their first practice call, and the “fix this next” point from their assessment becomes the first thing they work on. They practise as often as they need, at their own desk — no manager playing the customer, no waiting for a slot in someone’s diary.
- Same scenarios as the assessment
- Practice on demand
- Voice or text
Evidence for probation reviews, not a gut feeling
Every practice call is scored on the same rubric as the assessment, so you can see who is climbing, who has plateaued and who needs support — weeks before the probation review rather than at it.
- Attempt 1 vs attempt 6
- Transcripts attached
- Shareable reports
Once they’re on real calls, Kollup Live Assist listens along and suggests the next move from your own playbook. Hiring a whole class of agents? See call centre training with Kollup.
Hiring for a German desk, and nobody in HR speaks German?
Language roles are where interviews are weakest: a recruiter can check fluency but not selling, and the hiring manager may not speak the language at all. Kollup runs the assessment call in the candidate’s working language — 28+ languages — and can return every report in one language for the whole company. So HR can compare a Greek, a Polish and a German candidate on the same scorecard, in English.
- English
- German
- French
- Dutch
- Spanish
- Portuguese
- Italian
- Swedish
- Danish
- Norwegian
- Finnish
- Polish
- Czech
- Slovak
- Hungarian
- Romanian
- Bulgarian
- Greek
- Turkish
- Russian
- Ukrainian
- Hebrew
- Arabic
- Hindi
- Japanese
- Korean
- Chinese
- …and more on request
Fair to candidates. Careful with their data.
An assessment is part of your employer brand, and what a candidate says on it is personal data. Here’s how Kollup handles both.
The same conditions for everyone
Every candidate for a role gets the same customer, the same objections and the same scorecard — more consistency than most panel interviews manage. Tell candidates up front that they’ll be speaking to an AI customer and what the four scores measure; it’s a role-play, not a trick.
A person makes the hiring decision
Kollup scores the call; it doesn’t reject anyone. The report is evidence for your hiring manager to weigh alongside the interview, references and everything else they know about the candidate.
No recordings kept
Audio is transcribed as the candidate speaks and then discarded. Only the text is stored, inside your own company’s account, isolated at the database level from every other Kollup customer.
Paperwork your DPO will ask for
Our Data Processing Agreement and privacy policy are published, so your data protection team can review them before the demo. Shared report links can be revoked at any time.
Seats and minutes. One seat can assess a whole shortlist.
Every plan has the whole product — voice and text role-play, Live Assist, 28+ languages, unlimited scenarios, coaching reports. What changes is how many seats you need and how much you use them. Same plans as the rest of Kollup.
Seats that move between people
A candidate uses a seat for their assessment. When they’re done, reassign it to the next name on the shortlist — you pay for the chair, not the person in it, so a hiring round doesn’t mean buying a licence per applicant.
A shared pool of minutes
Minutes are pooled across the company. A shortlist of assessment calls uses a fraction of what a new team burns through in its first week of practice. Hiring in bulk next month? Email us and we’ll add minutes to that month’s invoice.
So let’s work out what your hiring actually needs
Tell us which roles you hire for, how many candidates usually reach the shortlist and how many new starters you onboard a year. We’ll tell you what it costs — including if Kollup isn’t the right fit for you yet.
30 minutes · no slide deck · we build an assessment for one of your open roles live on the call
What HR teams ask on the demo
What is a sales role-play assessment?
A sales role-play assessment asks a candidate to handle a realistic sales conversation — a cold call, a discovery call, a price objection — and scores how they do it. It’s a work-sample test — sometimes called a sales simulation or sales skills assessment: instead of asking how they would handle an objection, you hear them handle one.
Kollup runs the role-play with an AI customer, so every candidate gets the same scenario and is scored on the same rubric: discovery, objection handling, product knowledge and closing.
How does a candidate take the assessment?
You invite them onto a Kollup seat and assign the scenario for the role. They open it in the browser, allow the microphone once and start the call — nothing to install, no dialler, no IT ticket. They only see the scenario you assigned.
The report is in your account seconds after the call ends, and the seat can then be reassigned to the next candidate on the shortlist.
Does it replace the interview?
No, and it shouldn’t. It fits best between the CV screen and the first interview, so interview time goes to candidates who have already shown they can hold a sales conversation. The report also hands the interviewer something specific to ask about.
Kollup scores the call. People make the hiring decision.
Which roles can we assess with it?
Any role built around a conversation with a goal: SDRs and BDRs, inside sales, account executives, account managers, call centre sales agents, retention and save teams, collections outreach and appointment setters. It works across industries — FOREX, iGaming, insurance, real estate, B2B SaaS — because the scenario carries the product detail.
Pure inbound service roles — password resets, order status — aren’t what it scores well. If the role is service with a save or an upsell attached, that middle ground works fine.
Is an AI sales assessment fair to candidates?
It’s more consistent than most alternatives: every candidate gets the same customer, the same objections and the same scorecard, instead of a role-play whose difficulty depends on who is playing the customer that day.
We recommend telling candidates up front that they’ll be speaking to an AI customer and what the four scores measure, and treating the report as one input among several rather than an automatic pass/fail gate.
Can we assess candidates in other languages?
Yes — 28+, including German, French, Dutch, Spanish, the Nordic languages, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Arabic and Japanese. The language is set per scenario, and reports can come back in one language for the whole company, so an English-speaking HR team can compare candidates for a German-speaking role on the same scorecard.
What happens to candidate data and call recordings?
Kollup doesn’t keep recordings. Audio is transcribed as it’s spoken and discarded — only the text is stored, inside your own company’s account, never visible to another customer. Every account is isolated at the database level. Our Data Processing Agreement is published for your data protection team to review.
Does it integrate with our ATS?
There’s nothing to integrate before you start — Kollup runs in the browser. Each report can be shared as a read-only link or saved as a PDF, so it drops into the candidate’s record in whichever applicant tracking system you use.
Can new hires keep using it after they join?
Yes — that’s what it was built for. The scenario they were assessed on becomes their first practice call, every attempt is scored on the same rubric, and you can see their progress from attempt one onwards. Once they’re on real calls, Live Assist suggests the next move from your own playbook while the conversation is happening.
Do you work with companies outside Cyprus?
Yes. We’re based in Limassol, but Kollup runs in the browser and onboarding happens on a call, so where your team sits — or where your candidates are — makes no difference to how it’s set up.
Bring us the role you’re hiring for
Thirty minutes, no slide deck. Tell us the role and the call a new hire finds hardest — we’ll build the assessment live and you can take it yourself on the demo. If it wouldn’t tell you something your interview doesn’t, you’ll know inside five minutes.
Other industries: FOREX · Fintech & Crypto · Wealth Management · iGaming · Call Centres · Insurance · Medical Sales · FMCG & Distribution · Hotels, Events & Travel · Real Estate · Solar & Energy · Automotive · Recruitment · SaaS & Tech · Marketing Agencies · All Industries