Are your sales recruiting efforts struggling? There is no doubt it’s a candidate’s market. The power is in the sales candidate’s hands. Sales companies are in a tug of war to attract the top available talent. But, if you are having trouble finding top applicants, even in a candidate’s market, the issue may not be lack of candidates. It could be your recruiting process and poor habits.

Bad habits are difficult to change. They can have a significant impact on your performance. Sales recruiting is no different. As they say, old habits die hard. For many companies, they continue to use the same dated and convoluted recruiting strategies to attract candidates. The problem is these terrible habits don’t work.

Today you cannot afford to make mistakes when recruiting. You need to know what you are looking for, and when you find a great candidate, you need to be ready to snatch them up. Here Toronto sales recruiters outline some terrible habits that can greatly hurt your sales recruiting efforts:

1. Rushing Your Sales Recruiting Efforts

There is undoubtedly a sense of urgency during the recruiting process. You are hiring for a reason – to fill a vacancy, to better manage workload, or when creating new roles. Naturally, you want to fill the role as quickly as possible, but rushing through the hiring process is not advisable.

Even if you are in a rush, you need to take ample time to identify candidates, assess their fit and make sure they are the right person for the job. If you rush the process, you risk cutting corners, missing red flags, and making a hiring mistake. A bad hire can cause you more issues, affect morale, and you could find yourself looking to hire again much sooner than you anticipated.

2. Taking Too Long to Hire

On the other side of the coin, you can’t take too long to hire. Being thorough is important, but you also have to consider the candidates. A top talent is likely to have multiple employment opportunities. If you take too long to move along the hiring process, have unnecessary steps, or make a candidate wait too long, you risk losing them.

3. Basing Your Decision Solely on the Job Interview

The job interview is the centerpiece of recruiting top sales talent. It’s your opportunity to learn more about candidates, compare them, assess their fit for your company and get to know them on a personal level. The one problem is job interviews can be deceiving. There are many great talents who are not good at interviews, and there are lots of poor candidates who are great at interviews. After all, sales professionals are good at selling, including themselves during interviews.

Use additional resources to help you make your hiring decisions. Use references, referrals, past performance, and candidate testing to learn more. Ask for samples, use behavioural questions and perform mock sales calls to see a candidate in action. This will give you a larger pool of information about candidates and help you make a better overall hiring decision.

4. You Overstate the Job

You identify a great candidate and really want to bring them aboard. What do you do? Do you sell the opportunity to the moon? When you find a great candidate, you may be tempted to oversell the job to close the candidate. However, this is a huge mistake that can have immediate and future repercussions.

First, as soon as the candidate realizes what you said is too good to be true, they will disengage (if you haven’t hired them yet); or, if you’ve hired them, they will start looking for a new job.

People talk. If you develop a reputation for misleading candidates, it will affect your employer brand. Candidates will think twice about applying for jobs with your organization.

The same can be said for job descriptions. Yes, you want to make them enticing, but don’t overstate or mislead candidates.

5. Making a Gut Decision

You’ve never had access to more data and information to make your hiring decisions. You can test candidates, research them online, speak with references, ask for samples, and much more. It’s also never been easier to create candidate comparisons and match them to ideal candidate profiles.

But there are still hiring managers who opt to make a gut decision or use their intuition. The trouble with this approach is it’s less objective, and hiring bias is likely to creep into the decision, even if unintentional.

6. You Search for Candidates in the Same Place

There are countless channels to look for candidates today, but if you stick to the same job board because it’s worked well in the past, you are limiting your access to candidates. Sometimes you struggle to find the right candidate because you are not looking in the right place. Fish too much in the same place and the pond will eventually dry. You need to cast a wider net to create a more diverse candidate pool.

7. If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

Everything evolves. The way people recruit talent has changed greatly over the years. How much has your hiring process changed? While you may argue that you don’t want to tinker with something that works, there is always room for improvement.

Avoid sticking to the status quo. It’s important to continuously look for new ways to improve how you recruit talent. Try new recruitment tools, look for ways to improve your job ads, search for candidates in different places. If you are always looking for ways to improve, you will become more efficient and successful in your hiring efforts.

More Sales Recruiting Advice

Check out these great blogs from our Toronto sales recruiters. Get access to insight tips and advice about sales recruiting:

5 Ways to Separate the Sales Candidate Contenders From the Pretenders

Don’t Hire Them! 11 Job Candidate Red Flags to Watch Out For

Watch: How to Identify a True Rockstar Sales Director

Why Hiring Mistakes in Sales Are Even More Costly Than You Think

The 10 Easiest Ways to Spot an Unsuitable Sales Candidate

SalesForce Search is a Toronto sales recruiting company which specializes in the recruitment and placement of sales professionals. We recruit salespeople in every sector of the economy including, software, manufacturing, financial services and medical devices. Find the right salesperson for your organization, start your search here.