Are you disappointed with the sales resumes you are receiving through your online job postings? With the average job post delivering more than 250 resumes, many hiring managers are realizing that posting their company’s open positions on social media and job boards just isn’t enough. That’s where a relationship with a sales recruitment agency comes in handy.
Businesses like yours, looking to fill open sales positions, need to work with professionals that have the market knowledge, expertise, and connections to not just identify, but attract top sales talent to your business. This is where a sales recruitment agency comes into play. A sales recruiter can help you filter talent and efficiently match the best-fit candidates for your open sales positions – effectively eliminating the headaches, costs, and damage to your market reputation that come along with hiring the wrong candidate.
Before we dive into how your company can benefit from hiring a sales recruitment agency, let’s explore what the process of working with a sales recruitment agency looks like.
What Does a Sales Recruiter do?
A sales recruiter is an extension of your HR team and is responsible for the sourcing and screening stages of the hiring process for your business. Sales recruiters will collaborate with your HR department and any hiring of your internal managers to create a profile of your ideal sales candidate.
This profile often includes key hiring criteria that all candidates must meet. This includes:
- Sales skills (ie. Consultative selling; targeted account selling; upselling and cross-selling)
- Experience (Ie. Successful experience selling enterprise software to CMOs; experience hunting new accounts; experiencing selling in long-sales cycles)
- Track record of success (Ie. How many years have they hit and exceeded quota? How many times have they made president’s club? What’s been the largest deal they’ve closed?)
- Qualities (Ie. Are they an effective storyteller? Are they an effective listener? Is the candidate driven and competitive? Are they data literate?)
From there, a sales recruiter will tap into a pool of candidates to reach out to and screen for the position. Once the screening process has taken place, and your recruiter has identified candidates that meet your hiring criteria, you get the chance to select several candidates for interviews.
Why You Should Hire a Sales Recruiter
Working as an extension of your HR department, a sales recruitment agency helps you with all aspects of the hiring process. This includes gaining an understanding of the talent market within your industry, including candidate pool sizes, average compensation and pay packages, and organizations from which to target and hire from. It also includes guidance on how to optimize your hiring process to best attract and assess candidates so that critical talent acquisition metrics can be improved like time-to-hire and turnover rates.
Now that you know what a sales recruiter does for your hiring team, let’s talk about some of the key benefits of working with a sales recruitment agency to find your next great sales hire. Below are the top 7 reasons to work with a recruiter and how to improve the sales recruitment process.
1. Access a Larger Talent Pool
A sales recruitment agency already works with thousands of qualified candidates in the sales industry. When working with a sales recruitment agency, you immediately gain access to a large talent pool of top industry talent. These candidates have already been screened by recruiters and can be instantly matched to your open positions based on the candidate’s skills and job requirements.
2. Gain Insights Into Industry Trends
Recruiters stay on top of what hiring trends are going on within a niche industry. Working with companies similar to yours, sales recruiters can give you advice on the current job markets and what talent is looking for from new opportunities. They can also shed light on how your competitors and organizations within your broader industry are approaching hiring sales talent – including the roles they are hiring for, their employer value propositions, and most importantly the salaries and perks they’re offering. This helps you stay competitive in the job market and position your business as an employer of choice.
3. Fill Open Positions Quickly & Effectively
The sooner your organization can fill an open sales position, the sooner your business can get start driving top-line revenues and accelerating growth. However, hiring sales talent is typically a long process. Today, the average time-to-fill a sales role is 68 days, while the average time to hire of 57 days. This is notably higher than the average time to hire for all other roles. Ultimately, one of the hardest and most daunting positions for organizations to fill are sales executive roles. The good news is that the with the right sales executive recruiter, you will be quickly and efficiently matched with qualified candidates. In fact, Talentfoot sales recruiting typically reduces an organization’s time-to-hire by more than 30%.
4. Recruiting Expertise
Recruiters have access to top technology, tools, and resources that your HR department may not or costly recruiting software that would be an unnecessary expense for your business. Great recruiters also have strong research, problem-solving, and communication skills that aid your business hiring strategy.
5. Retain New Hires & Reduce Turnover
Turnover can be costly for businesses. In fact, according to Sales Benchmark Index, the average cost of a bad sales hire can range anywhere from $1,352,500 in hard dollars and opportunity costs, and up to 18 months of time. However, when a candidate is carefully matched with your company, turnover rates radically decline. Recruiters spend a lot of time vetting candidate to ensure a candidate will be a good match for your company. The best sales recruiters use a combination of behavioral based interviews, psychometric assessments, role-playing exercises, and situational based selling scenarios, while cross-referencing a candidate’s track record of selling success.
6. Free Up Your HR Team’s Time
A sales recruiter has already vetted candidates before sending them for interviews, which keeps your HR team from wasting your time on lengthy interviews with under qualified candidates. Every aspect of a sales recruiter’s job is to take away the repetitive work of the hiring process, allowing you to focus on what matters the most, selecting the right candidates for your company.
7. Start Growing Today
The best part about working with a sales recruitment agency is that they fill your open sales positions with qualified candidates that are capable of hitting the ground running. This means that your new hires already know how to sell or lead a sales team so they can get in the field and sell your products and services faster. When you work with a proven sales recruitment agency, you are making the conscious decision to start growing today instead of months from now.
Talentfoot – Start Benefiting From Hiring a Sales Recruiter Today
We hope you realize by now that working with a sales recruiter is the best way to fill your company’s open sales positions. Our team of sales recruiters is here to help you succeed in attracting and hiring top industry talent in today’s competitive job market. Contact us today and get ready to fill your open sales positions with our proven search process.
