Attracting top sales talent is essential for the success of any organization. It doesn’t matter how great the services and products you have to offer if you can’t convince potential clients and customers of that fact! But top quality sales people are not just a dime a dozen, and it might take the efforts of a skilled sales recruiter to help businesses locate them. Do you think you are dynamic enough to take on the role of sales recruitment? Here are some of the secrets to becoming a top sales recruiter.

Don’t Just Rely on Resumes

You’ve probably heard before that resumes often contain false information, and unfortunately this is a fact. With more competition than ever for available jobs, candidates find it harder to stand apart from the crowd. This need to attract attention can lead to overly inflated resumes, which makes the resume a less reliable tool for finding the right candidates. The wise sales recruiter knows that you can’t rely on just a resume to find the best person for the job anymore. Consider using a mix of the resume, background checks and references, multiple rounds of interviewing and that ever-important but often discredited “gut feeling.”

Look at Your Past Successes

Chances are very good that you already have a good guide to help you choose good sales professionals. You have to look no further than your past recruits to find examples of the kind of talent you want to attract. What qualities worked well in previous recruits, and which ones turned out to be failures? Sales recruiters don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they look for new candidates. Chances are that you already know what makes up a good candidate because you have likely already found one before.

Have a Clear Sense of the Job Requirements

You can’t always find what you are looking for if you don’t have a clear sense of what it is you hope to find. It isn’t good enough to just say that you want to hire a strong candidate; you need to have a solid job description in mind. A successful sales recruiter will come to the task equipped not just with a job description, but with a performance profile. Salespeople will be expected to meet certain performance metrics once on the job, usually related to lead generation, qualifying leads, preparing proposals and closing the sale. It is important for the sales recruiter to look for candidates who can meet these metrics. Most likely, you won’t hire a sales person who completely lacks experience in sales, so you can look at past performance as a pretty reliable indicator of future performance as well.

Master the Art of Networking

Being a good sales recruiter is about more than just trolling job boards, looking for sales people seeking their next opportunity. A sales recruiter needs to have the kind of magnetic, outgoing and fun personality that draws people near. Constant conversations with strangers and acquaintances are a valuable habit for the sales recruiter, one which will naturally build up your personal network, which widens your available pool of potential recruits.