Today’s job hunters are savvy. It’s easier than ever to find out inside information about almost any organization. But when you have negative reviews on Glassdoor, it can hurt your ability to recruit top talent. Some organizations have taken Glassdoor reviews into their own hands by employing a proactive approach to managing their external reputation.
.What Motivates Recruiters to Help You Find Top Sales Talent?
Yesterday I had a conversation with a potential client.
He was frustrated because he hadn’t been able to find a replacement hire for over seven months. He was already working with three other recruiters and had no candidates in current consideration for the role.
Are the recruiters to blame? They had presented multiple candidates, and the one that the client was most interested in was over the budgeted compensation level. He made a comment that he thought perhaps the recruiters just wanted more money and were inflating salary expectations.
In good economies and bad, finding top talent is difficult. Think it’s any easier for Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Google? Sure, they have distinct competitive advantages, but it still takes teams of recruiters interviewing around the clock to recruit and hire staff even for well branded growing organizations.
With everyone promising high-growth, big OTEs, and amazing products, it can be hard to compete for top sales talent. Many of today’s sales candidate have been promised the moon a few times, only to become a bit more skeptical with each job move. A CEB study in 2014 concluded that 65% of Millennials are more skeptical of employer claims than they were in 2011.
Quality of Hire: Another Meaningless Metric for Sales Hires
Measuring recruitment success in the sales department has never been more important. In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, every sales hire counts. Time-to-fill, the all-time most important recruitment metric, has been replaced with an overarching obsession for “quality of hire.” Yet one deeply entrenched problem remains inherent in this metric. Unlike measuring time-to-fill, which is a fairly straight forward calculation, untethering quality of hire from other variables is virtually impossible. You don’ have a shot at making this measurement meaningful for your sales hires. It’s too intertwined and dependent upon other pre-hire variables.
I had a candidate in my earlier years that loved to talk. At the time, I thought perhaps he just loved to talk to ME. I considered myself to be a pretty good listener so I figured he would cut down his answers in the proceeding interviews.
Well, despite my warnings about being careful not to “hog all the air time”…he wasn’t able to apply the feedback when he met with my client.
If you told me you’ve tried using a recruitment firm in the past, and things didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be surprised. Although there are a lot of exceptional recruiters out there, a few bad experiences can taint a person’s willingness to try again.
If you’re looking at a recruiting firm like a commodity, you probably won’t get good results. I’ve gotten calls from companies who’ve had searches out to multiple firms and are were adamant about paying discounted fees. Saving a few thousand dollars today was more important than hiring the best employee.
It’s no secret sales turnover is expensive. Putting a number to the financial loss can make you feel queasy. But what’s even worse is finding a replacement for your top rep. It’s an exercise in frustration, disappointment, and frankly, it’s an excruciating process.
Although some turnover is obviously healthy, when you start losing the top 25% of your sales team, things can start to look bleak. Too often it starts when one top rep leaves, then before you know it; your top three performers are gone.
So what can you do to keep your best sales pros happy and productive?
One of my clients, a small private technology headquartered in Norway saw things differently.
When we first met, the tech hiring philosophy of day was to hire salespeople quickly, try them out, and if they didn’t make a deal in x number of days (usually 30, 60, or 90 days if you’re lucky) to fire them.
Are you recruiting top software sales talent and running into roadblocks? You’re not alone. The sales function appears to be an easy role to recruit for on the outset. Yet recruiting sales talent is one of the more difficult and time-consuming recruitment jobs around.
