9 years ago
January 7, 2015

Engineering a Great Sales Recruitment Process

In order to develop a great sales team, it is vital to work out your sales recruitment process.

Rhys Metler

great sales recruitment processIn order to develop a great sales team, it is vital to work out your sales recruitment process. Taking the time to create a good recruitment process will ensure that your retention rates stay high and your sales team stays productive.

1. Develop a plan with what you want from your sales team.

Create a list of the goals that you want your company to achieve and the type of sales people you want on your team. Rank the personality traits that are important to you in your employees and use this list to help you go through your new hires to find right candidates. This makes your sales recruitment process much more effective. 

Put together a list of all of the duties that you want your team to accomplish and determine which core competencies are essential for the position. Again, this will help you weed through candidates who do not have these core abilities.

2. Target the right personality types.

Highly talented sales people will share several ingrained traits such as high levels of self motivation, a strong sense of self confidence without being obnoxious and the ability to know how to create a relationship with a lead and groom them into a prospect and then a customer. 

Targeting the wrong personality type is a common mistake that many companies make in their sales recruitment process. The old style of sales team member typically included those who excelled at the bullying tactic of sales — this will not work in today’s environment. You want candidates who are subtle and focus more on helping customers meet their needs, rather than forcing them into products they don’t want or need.

3. Create your on-boarding process.

The last step of developing a sales recruitment process that works is creating a way to on-board all of your new candidates. This ensures that they will be able to get off to a great start and helps ease them into your company. For untrained sales candidates, the process should be a bit longer and should include some basic sales coaching as well as learning about your unique processes. For candidates that know more, you’ll just need to focus on teaching them how you want them to work.

Skipping through on-boarding creates a sink or swim situation for candidates and in the end is not a productive way to get your new candidates working. A high quality sales recruitment process will include at least some on-boarding.

Once you have a sales recruitment process, all you will have to do is stick with it and you’ll begin to see results. Over time, you’ll be able to build a strong sales team that will help you meet and exceed your sales goals and help your company continue to grow.

Rhys Metler

Rhys is a tenacious, top performing Senior Sales Recruiter with 15+ years of focused experience in the Digital Media, Mobile, Software, Technology and B2B verticals. He has a successful track record of headhunting top performing sales candidates for some of the most exciting brands in North America. He is a Certified Recruitment Specialist (CRS) and has expert experience in prospecting new business, client retention/renewals and managing top performing sales and recruitment teams. Rhys enjoys spending quality time with his wife, son, and daughters, BBQing on a hot summer day and tropical vacations.

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