When small businesses and startups are ready to start scaling, one of the first positions they look to hire is a sales representative. Oftentimes, these entrepreneurs and business owners have little to no experience with hiring and even less experience with hiring salespeople.
However, the companies who are successful when hiring sales reps all have one thing in common: they start with a defined hiring process and stick to it. Diving right into hiring will help get the ball rolling, but will ultimately cause a lot of wasted time and disorganization in the long run.
There are eight key steps that will help you find your best possible candidate, and save you time and money while doing it.
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Define Requirements
Before you can start searching for your ideal candidate, you first have to define what skills and characteristics you would like to see in your new hire. There needs to be an initial discussion to talk through specific requirements of the open position and to learn what type of candidate you’re looking to hire. Use this time to ask many questions and really drill down into the type of person you’re looking to hire. Everyone involved in the hiring process should give their input during this discussion and it should last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the thoroughness of the discussion. In small businesses, this meeting may consist of the just the CEO and President, or may involve the whole company.
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Create Search Specification
Once the requirement meeting is completed, you can then create a search profile. The search profile consists of taking the information from the requirements phase, and putting in down on paper in a more organized and structured manner. Before this information is finalized, send it to everyone involved in the hiring process to make sure there’s agreement in the requirements. This is an important step of the process because it eliminates any gray area and streamlines the recruiting process. You don’t want to spend time searching for a sales candidate with a certain experience level to find out that not everyone agreed on that requirement.
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Establish Recruiting Strategy
The next step of the process is to develop a recruiting strategy. Each job strategy is unique and created based on the position’s specific requirements, location, and industry. For example, you may decide you want to target competitor’s employees and will need to find the through networking and LinkedIn. After the strategy is complete and you start the search process, you should then create a project timeline.
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Construct Project Timeline
This timeline not only holds you accountable, but it also allows you to come up with a timeline for any training or onboarding sessions for the new hire. The timeline for each position varies, but on average, employers spend an average of 41 days trying to fill technical sales jobs, compared with an average of 33 days for all jobs for a 12 month period in 2014, according to Burning Glass, a labor-market analysis firm.
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Recruit and Qualify Candidates
Once the requirements and timelines are nailed down, it’s time to execute your recruiting strategy and begin to qualify candidates. There are many actions that need to be taken during this stage, and you might have to refine and change your strategy along the way in order to find the right candidates. Some of the actions that need to be taking place during this stage are proactively recruiting, sharing job descriptions, and reaching out to passive candidates.Your goal during this stage should be to create a short-list of candidates for the interview stage.
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Narrow Down Your List of Candidates
The best way to increase efficiency and productivity is to narrow down your potential interview candidates to a short list of around four people. Don’t just schedule an interview with the first person that submits their resume or looks good after the first screening. The four candidates that you choose should have been evaluated for weeks and are the best people out of the pack. This strategy will save you time and money because only the four best candidates get the chance to interview and executives aren’t wasting their time by interviewing poor candidates.
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Interviews
When the project timeline is being established, an interview date should also be scheduled during this time. Having a set interview date makes the recruiting process tight and is incremental in getting the candidates interviewed in an efficient manner. When you set up one interview at a time, then wait for feedback from all the interviewers, it really kills the whole recruiting process. Once interview dates are set, there is accountability on finding the candidates in time and helps keep the momentum going during the process.
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Reference Checks/Background Check
After the interviews take place, reference checks and background checks should be performed on the top candidates. These reference checks are essential in evaluating top candidates against each other, especially if two candidates both do really well in the interview and both have great experience. The background check can easily help you make a decision and propel one of the candidates into the offer stage.
Using a proven recruiting process can help increase your efficiency, save you time and money, and help ensure you hire the best candidate possible.
If you want to learn more about Naviga’s proven recruiting process, reach out at 866-847-4156 or contact us via webform.
