Sales recruitment is one of the most challenging and critical functions for any business. You need to find and hire the best candidates who can drive revenue, build relationships, and adapt to changing markets. But how do you overcome the common obstacles that sales recruiters face, such as talent shortages, high turnover, or diversity gaps? Here are some tips to help you handle these sales recruitment challenges and improve your hiring outcomes.
Identify your ideal sales profile Before you start looking for candidates, you need to define what kind of salesperson you want to hire. What skills, traits, and experience are essential for your sales role? What are the specific goals and expectations for the position? How do you measure and reward performance? By creating a clear and realistic sales profile, you can narrow down your search and attract more qualified and relevant applicants.
It is important to note when creating a profile, you want to focus more on job specific skills or traits rather than personality traits. This will allow you to look beyond CV experience or standard key words and allow you investigate transferable skill sets.
Use professional recruiters and multiple channel approaches One of the main reasons for talent shortages in sales is the limited pool of candidates who are actively looking for a job. To expand your reach and find more passive and diverse candidates, you should consider professional recruiters and multi channel approaches. These multi channel approaches can include referrals, social media, online platforms, events, and networking. By using a professional recruiter, you will be able to access a larger pool of candidates, these candidates can then be assessed at multiple levels before being introduced to you meaning a more proactive and effective recruitment cycle.
By diversifying your sourcing methods, you can increase your visibility and credibility as an employer and tap into different talent segments.
By using a recruiter such as Closers Ace, you will also be able to have candidates that have gone through a basic level of training specific to the job role. This will not only put the candidate on a good footing, but also give them an idea of exactly the tasks they will be pursuing to ensure the match is correct.
Provide a positive candidate experience
High turnover in sales is often a result of poor fit, unrealistic expectations, or lack of engagement. To reduce the risk of losing your new hires, you need to provide a positive candidate experience throughout the recruitment process. This means communicating clearly and frequently, setting transparent and accurate expectations, providing feedback and support, and showcasing your company culture and values. By making your candidates feel valued and respected, you can build trust and loyalty and improve your retention rate.
But be true to the companies values through this hiring experience. Most recruits who are hired will have an expectation from this experience but if from day one onwards they experience a different culture, they are most likely going to develop a narrow mindset of the company and could start with a dampened motivation and morale.
Assess sales skills and potential
Another challenge in sales recruitment is to assess the sales skills and potential of your candidates. How do you know if they can perform well in your sales environment, handle objections, and close deals? One way to evaluate your candidates is to use sales assessments, such as simulations, role-plays, case studies, or personality tests. These can help you measure the relevant competencies, behaviours, and motivations of your candidates and compare them to your ideal sales profile.
The best recruiters do not recruit only off experience, but rather they understand the values of the candidate, ambitions and transferable skills. In the hospitality industry, almost every role comes with a trail shift to see if the candidate has the practical skills needed, this can easily be adopted within sales industries through the course of assessments as stated above.
Promote diversity and inclusion
Diversity gaps in sales can limit your ability to reach and serve different markets, customers, and perspectives. To promote diversity and inclusion in your sales team, you need to adopt a proactive and intentional approach. This can involve reviewing and removing any biases or barriers in your job descriptions, sourcing channels, screening methods, and hiring decisions. It can also involve creating and fostering a culture of respect, belonging, and empowerment for your diverse sales talent.
Optimise your onboarding and training The final step in handling sales recruitment challenges is to optimise your onboarding and training for your new hires. Onboarding and training are essential to help your salespeople understand their role, learn the product, develop the skills, and integrate into the team. By providing a structured and engaging onboarding and training program, you can accelerate the learning curve, boost the confidence, and increase the productivity of your new sales hires.
Every new hire within the sales world wants to perform straight away, a candidate who feels supported and invested in will show a larger appreciation and motivation to hit the ground running. The onboarding and ongoing continual training of employees will also enable bad habits from previous employers be removed and ensure smoother progress and integration.
In Summary
Sales has one of the largest staff turnovers in the employment world. This is expensive and time consuming to any business to constantly address. If you have a consistent, thought out and proactive approach to hiring, onboarding and training your team and future hires, you will experience a much larger output across the board. Stress from a reduced team or low morale can effect current team members, managers and the wider admin team. Constant advertised hiring allow a negative image of a company to be broadcast and therefore a lower morale for current team members and new hires. Recruitment is fundamentally the most important part of a company to get right!
Written in collaboration with Linked In and Closers Ace.