Owners and managers of sales organizations know just how critical it is to hire great sales people. Without effective recruitment and hiring strategies, you’ll keep onboarding poor or mediocre sales reps. You’ll face higher turnover. You’ll waste time and money. And your entire organization—and particularly your sales—will suffer.

When it comes to hiring sales professionals, it’s best to work with sales recruiting agencies. These agencies will be able to find and hire top talent, fill roles faster, fill multiple roles at once, and generally improve your business.

However, these benefits will only be realized if you work with top sales recruiting agencies. No two firms are alike. And it pays to know what to look for in sales recruiting agencies when seeking out a new recruiting and hiring partner.

Here are some important considerations.

Specialization in Sales

Many staffing agencies will tell you that they can absolutely help you find sales people. But at the same time, they’re finding engineers, administrative assistants, general labourers, nurses, and financial professionals for other clients. Sales is a specialized field and it takes unique knowledge and experience to understand how to find and hire top talent. A generalized staffing agency simply will not have the expertise required to do so.

The best sales recruiting agencies specialize in sales and only recruit sales professionals. This specialty ensures that all of their time and resources are spent on finding great sales pros—not secretaries or writers. They won’t be distracted.

In addition, the best sales recruiting agencies will have recruiters and representatives on staff who were, at one time, sales professionals themselves. This ensures that they truly understand what it takes to succeed in the field and understand the common hiring challenges and how to overcome them.

Reputation

When it comes to sales recruiting agencies, reputation matters—a lot. The top sales professionals aren’t going to seek out or want to work with staffing agencies with bad reputations. If you want to hire top talent, you need to work with a recruiting firm that is known for its success in the industry, that has positive reviews, and that is known to treat its candidates well. The top sales recruiters with a great reputation can attract top sales people—they don’t have to chase them down.

Experience

A newly opened recruiting firm might use your company as a guinea pig to refine its hiring process. It might not have tried-and-true recruiting and hiring strategies yet. It might still be in the process of making and learning from its mistakes. And if it’s only been in business for a short while, its recruiters haven’t had the chance to build long-term, loyal relationships with top talent yet.

The best sales recruiting agencies have already proven their success in the industry, have already refined their tactics and methods, and have had many years to gain knowledge and expertise, learn from their mistakes, and create and nurture relationships with talent.

Customer Service

Having open positions in your sales department for too long can have serious consequences: it can significantly harm your productivity, your sales, and ultimately, your bottom line. You need a sales recruiting firm that will answer your calls right away and get started immediately on the hiring process. When things go wrong or you have concerns, you also want to ensure that your customer service representative will be there to help you.

A sales recruiting firm with poor customer service will not be able to meet all of your needs, and will just end up leading to frustration and resentment on your end. And this is, of course, not a good factor in a partnership.

The best recruiting firms will be quick to respond, will answer your questions thoroughly and honestly, and will be completely focused on finding you top sales talent as soon as possible.