Many companies struggle with attracting, recruiting and keeping top sales talent. Companies worldwide report a shortage of talent in both junior and senior sales positions. Finding top talent is difficult enough, but the ability to attract them to your company and brand, and minimize turnover on your team long-term is something most sales organizations struggle to do.
The first thing you need to do is examine how well you understand and communicate the requirements of the role you’re looking to fill. Does the position require unique competencies, or does it call for the right soft skills and personality type? The answer is never entirely one or the other. Understanding which qualities are most important for the role for which you’re hiring will make your communication with prospective candidates far more effective.
If your company is inundated with low-quality applicants, it pays to examine how you are sourcing your candidates. Many sales companies still rely on online job posting boards, hoping that with luck, the right candidate will find their job posting at the right time. This passive approach to recruitment is highly ineffective and time consuming.
If this is the best method your company has for finding candidates, it is time that you consider seeking the services of a reliable talent recruitment agency.
When considering a prospective recruiter, ask them about their candidate assessment methodology, and whether it evaluates a candidate’s soft skills — which are a significant predictor of a candidate’s job performance — as well as their experience and relevancy. Ensure that the recruiter can give you a working timeline for finding candidates (it should be days, not weeks) and is transparent about their fees and offerings.
Good sales recruitments agencies — like Sales Talent Agency — are experienced at finding candidates for top-level, as well as junior positions. An effective agency, such as this, will have an extensive professional database, with a high number of qualified candidates. Their job is not only to find your company an experienced candidate, but an ideal candidate for the position and the organization. They will have experience recruiting for companies in a variety of sales industries and should be able provide an impressive list of references of satisfied clients.
A good sales recruitment agency is like a great business partner, they should be invested in the success of your organization and work diligently to ensure that your company finds the ideal candidate for its sales force.
If you insist on going it alone, keep track of the costs associated with your current recruitment process. This includes the time and expense of sending your message out to prospective talent, communicating with applicants, as well as screening and interviewing candidates. Add to that the costs of high turnover, which are often attributed to ineffective hiring practises.
When you’re done, compare how these costs stack up against the fees of a leading sales recruitment agency and their track record of successful placement. It might just push you to reconsider your current process.
In order to secure top sales talent, companies can no longer afford to be passive in their recruitment process. Today’s market requires the leaders of sales organizations to be innovative and invested in the process of attracting and retaining talent. Companies unwilling to invest in their recruitment process will have to content themselves with whatever sales talent they’re able to find.