Avoiding a Sales Hiring Snafu

How to hire a sales rep

Hiring mistakes for sales positions are not just costly from a time and training perspective, they can cost you 6 to 10 times that employees base salary. Your sales force is your front line to profits and their absence represents lost opportunity and duplication of effort. An executive search can help you narrow down the right candidates and best sales people so that your best sales jobs are not vacant.

Finding the right executive recruiting firms can make your search a lot smoother and more efficient. When looking at sales performance across the U.S., 40 percent will miss quota, 22 percent cannot be trained, and just 10 percent give you a positive return on investment. With those numbers, your executive search and selection takes on a greater level of scrutiny and importance.

Depending on your industry, you may want to talk to other colleagues that have evaluated executive search firms to get a sense of their success ratings. You can also use professional networking sites and third party review sites to evaluate executive search firms against their competition. Their numbers should be fairly straight forward, but previous client comments will give you insight into the typical process.

Remember, while the executive recruiters are versed in evaluating and researching resumes, you are the expert on your company and what it takes to make it there. Use your insights when talking to potential recruiters to make sure you identify someone that has the best potential to be successful and to thrive in the long term. Sometimes they will offer testing and other criteria as part of their recruiting process. You can take that process and tweak it to fit your business situation also.

It has been said that communication, patience and perseverance are the top qualities of a premier sales executive. You can take a play from their playbook in being slow to select your candidates to assure that they will perform as expected.

3 comments

  1. Yes, they are set up to provide viable candidates from the very beginning. You can tweak your search based on the candidates that they provide from the start.

  2. Yes, they are set up to provide viable candidates from the very beginning. You can tweak your search based on the candidates that they provide from the start.

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