When it comes to sales hiring, most employers don’t realize they’re making crucial mistakes in their hiring process. Many companies have had the same sales hiring process in place for years and as long as candidates are applying for their positions, they believe the process is working.
However, the number of sales applicants is not always a good indicator of success. Instead, you should focus on finding high-quality sales resumes and you will start to see success in your growing revenue, high performing sales reps, and improved sales rep retention rate.
THE PROBLEM WITH MORE SALES RESUMES
I want to describe a common scenario that happens to many employers before they reach out to Naviga for assistance.
First, a new sales position will open up at their company and the owner will start to panic. The owner, admin, or another employee will be tasked to research a job description, post the job, and review the job applicants.
However, this employee also has other job responsibilities to complete and won’t have enough time to devote to advertising, researching the role, finding the best place to post the job ad, and reaching out to highly qualified passive candidates. Instead, they will end up using a generic job description, only posting the job on their company website or large job board, and waiting to review the applicants.
Next, the resumes will start to flood their inbox. Before you know it, hundreds of resumes are filling their inbox. In fact, on average, 250 resumes are received for each job opening, varying with the company and the job. Also, using a generic job description tend to produce less than qualified candidates and some candidates may not even have any experience in sales at all.
The person in charge of reviewing the resumes will quickly feel overwhelmed and decide to speak with the first decent looking candidates they find. Also, it’s likely this person doesn’t have much sales hiring experience, if any, and won’t know how to really search and identify the top performers out of the hundreds of applicants.
Out of these candidates, a few will be interviewed and eventually, one will be hired. Unfortunately, in this scenario, the chosen candidate generally isn’t a perfect fit for the position and will likely underperform or quit in the near future.
And these results aren’t surprising. According to NFIB Small Business Economic Trends, 47% of small businesses cannot find qualified applicants for open positions, and adding more sales resumes to the mix isn’t going to improve your odds.
WHY YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON FINDING MORE RELEVANT RESUMES
Sadly, the scenario described above is more commonplace than you may think. While employers may have the best intentions to find top sales reps, merely posting a job and waiting for the perfect candidate to appear is highly unlikely. Instead, you will end up having to choose a candidate from a stack of unqualified resumes.
However, if you focus on strategies to reach out to highly qualified sales candidates, you can increase your odds of finding the right candidate for your position. Discover how to become hyper-focused on your hiring strategy and minimize the number of unqualified resumes you review:
DON’T JUST RELY ON APPLICANTS
One of the biggest mistakes employers make is to only interview and hire candidates who apply to their open position. The problem with posting your opening on general job boards — CareerBuilder, Indeed and even LinkedIn — is that a lot of unqualified applicants will apply. Instead, you need to actively search for top candidates and that will require time, strategy and money. You will need to create a specific sourcing strategy, have a devoted person — whether internally or an external recruitment firm — to keep up ongoing search efforts, and pay for advanced search access on LinkedIn or other job boards.
If you want to hire top qualified candidates, you need to actively search for top candidates and that will require time, strategy and money. You will need to create a specific sourcing strategy, have a devoted person — whether internally or an external recruitment firm — to keep up ongoing search efforts, and pay for advanced search access on LinkedIn or other job boards.
Also, when you only review job applicants who apply for your position, it’s impossible to know what the rest of the competition looks like. If you use more resources — pay for niche job boards, networking on LinkedIn, utilize your applicant tracking system, etc — to seek out both active and passive job candidates, you have a standard to compare to and can be confident you’re hiring the best person for the position.
DEVELOP A SOURCING STRATEGY
There are a ton of top professionals on LinkedIn and other job boards, but if you don’t have a solid sourcing strategy, then you’re going to make your job very difficult. The first step in creating your strategy is to make sure you have the right tools.
You will need to have either Sales Navigator, Recruiter Lite, or Recruiter versions of LinkedIn or pay for employer subscriptions to CareerBuilder or Monster. Once you have these tools, you can start to search for specific profiles, skills, backgrounds, companies, etc. based on what your ideal candidate profile looks like. You can even get very specific in your criteria and search by years, specific keywords, targeted competitors and other companies, and location.
You can then use Inmail to reach out to these targeted people or pay for a subscription database that has information about business people and companies and how to reach out to them either via phone or email.
UTILIZE YOUR TEAM
Another great option to find top sales reps is to use your current employees. Ask your team for referrals and offer them an incentive if their referral is hired. Also, your current team is your biggest advocate. Have them post articles, reviews and team related content on their social networks. Candidates searching for your company will trust what current employees have to say.
POST YOUR JOB ON SPECIALIZED JOB BOARDS
If you limit yourself to only using one job board to source candidates, you eliminate top candidates who are using other job boards or professional networks. Consider posting your position on niche job boards like Sales Gravy or other specialized sales job boards. You can eliminate many unqualified candidates that will apply to your job on the larger job boards and have more targeted sales people applying to your position instead.
HIRE AN EXPERT
Even if you buy the necessary tools and subscriptions needed to find top sales candidates, you still need to know how to use the tools and techniques to access these candidates. A specialized sales recruiter will have the expertise needed to quickly access highly targeted resumes. Not only will they know who to look for, but they will know where to look for them as well.
Another tool recruiters have access to is an applicant tracking system. If you work with an established sales recruiting firm, they will hundreds of thousands of qualified sales resumes and candidates in their database.
Hiring the right sales rep does not come cheap, but the costs of having unfilled positions are even more significant. There’s the cost of your team spending time on searching and interviewing potential candidates, lost productivity while the position remains unfilled, the ramp up time it takes for the new hire to get up to speed, and more. However, if you’re able to streamline the process and only review qualified candidates, you will save more time and money in the long run.
Where do you have the most success finding qualified sales candidates?
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