The Evolution of Enterprise Sales: Why Traditional Recruitment Methods Are Failing Tech Companies

Why Traditional Recruitment Fails

Reason # 1: Over-reliance on Resumes

Every good hiring manager uses a resume to decide if they want to take an interview. It’s easy to let a resume persuade you to pass because interviewing eats your time and takes a lot of work. 

Use resumes to qualify candidates in and out for interviews, but keep in mind only so much information is included.

This means we get into the habit of making resume-driven hiring decisions.

For example, quotas speak to hitting targets but say nothing about how the deal came about, what skills were used to move the deal forward or even if the revenue generated was profitable.

This means what is unsaid, unseen, and uncaptured on a resume must be assessed and evaluated through other means that are more nuanced and ultimately more difficult to quantify and evaluate. 

Reason # 2: Ignoring Remote Dynamics

Nothing drastically shrinks a talent pool like a limited geography.

If you’re recruiting specific niche skills, casting a wider geographical net will almost always yield better results.

If you want your new hire reporting into the office, you will likely compromise on other potentially critical skills that you’ll need to invest in developing.

You’ll hire the best of those living near your office rather than the best person for the role. In some cases, the tradeoff is worth it, but in many, it simply stagnates your company’s growth and stifles your company’s potential.

In political science, geographical determinism is geography’s ability to determine a society’s culture, lifestyle, and, ultimately, its destiny.

In recruiting, limiting candidates by geography often means settling for less qualified people when stronger candidates exist elsewhere.

We can easily escape this limiting factor by expanding the search geography.

Reason # 3: Neglecting Contextual Fit

The variables needed to align contextual fit are often generalized and therefore overlooked.

A candidate’s success depends on alignment with the company’s values, key processes, product maturity, target buyer personas, brand authority, and culture.

Several enduring management philosophies rely on one common iron rule:

 Past Success = Future Success

This is a generalization and is true to an extent. But it has real limits that prove costly to ignore. If the above is 60% true, or even more true than not true, the following is ratcheted up to 80% true:

              Past Success in Similar Situations = Future Success in Similar Situations

And to increase our accuracy, we need to break it down further:

Past Success (similar product, similar deal size, similar quota, similar ICPs) + Similar Lead Generation Methods + Similar Product Demand + Similar Brand Authority + Similar Support Infrastructure = Future Success in Similar (p + ds + q+ ICP+ LG + PD + BA + SI) Company

The Complex Contextual Fit of Enterprise Sales 

Let’s look at sales.

An overachiever in one sales environment may or may not be an overachiever in another.

This can be completely buried and a non–sequitur in certain circumstances:

Case #1 — You hire a unicorn superstar salesperson.  Motivated, highly adaptable, a quick learner, and takes initiative.

This is the kind of salesperson who comes along once every 500 sales hires. This is the kind of salesperson who will soon become a successful CEO. This is not the kind of salesperson you will find more than once or twice in your career.

But when they work for you, they will hide a lot of flaws from your view because they will find a way to achieve the outcomes you need to succeed regardless of the situation/limitations/lack of x, lack of y, lack of z. End stop.

Case #2 –You have a disruptive product with high demand. In high-demand situations, the level of talent you’ll need to succeed will be far less than in situations of market saturation, commoditization, new product launches, or product inferiority.

This is why sometimes you see a sales team humming along, doing well, and everyone is making money until they don’t. At first, everyone is in denial, then they try to remedy the situation by doing ‘more’.

The first line of attack is almost always more, but “more” at some point won’t be enough.

Eventually, a new sales team with different skill sets will be brought in. Once the problems are resolved with new skills, winning will resume.

You can expand faster if you identify talent with similar contextual experience, as they are more likely to contribute quickly.

Companies that refine this area of their hiring methodology tend to reduce ramp time and improve retention. 

Reason # 4: Prioritizing Speed Over Precision

Rushed hires geared toward filling seats tend to cost more in the long run.

Slower doesn’t necessarily equate to better, but when you slow the interview process down, you tend to uncover more information. Slowing down the process lets you see how the candidate you’re evaluating handles different situations and environments.

And because it takes time to understand what a good candidate looks like for your specific situation, slower-paced hiring can be better when you lack functional hiring experience.

You can know a lot about hiring, but hiring is a skill. And skills are developed through practice and mistake-making.

So, the less experience you have with hiring, the more likely you will benefit from slowing down your desire to rush into a new hire.