The number one frustration we hear from recruiting professionals is:
“I can’t find enough quality candidates!”
Thousands of young sales leaders, managers, insurance agents, and entrepreneurs wake up each morning looking for people to add to their sales teams. If responsible for the entire marketing and sales cycle, it’s important for them to find people who can prospect, sell and serve customers.
They want their salespeople to find selling opportunities, make sales, and create repeat customers. Because, they want to grow their profits and brand reputation. Instead of low sales and high turnover, they want to build a high-retention sales force with a tradition of amazing performance.
With today’s competitive and economic realities, to recruit the best salespeople we must overcome two major problems. These are:
- Find Enough of the Right Kind of Candidates.
- Make the Right Selections and Hire the Best.
Sourcing for Salespeople
Great sourcing begins with reaching out along with marketing online. Prospecting and setting appointments are the hardest work activities in professional selling. And, the same goes for recruiting, because good prospecting requires you to move toward people you do not know — to go out into the community to find clients or candidates.
In “retail selling,” reps wait for new prospects to walk in the door. In a similar way, recruiters might wait for resumes to come into their offices or people to respond to online ads. In both cases, waiting until prospects show up can become a convenient habit that doesn’t yield the best results.
Great sales managers when recruiting new people are like great salespeople. They prospect. They move toward lead sources and find the places where the best prospects work and hang out. They discover influence centers which can help them. They network in the community, and they go where they receive the highest quality leads and referrals. They move into the world and search for new candidates. They do not wait for good candidates to come to them.
That’s because the best candidates for sales positions are already working. So, this is very important to know. They are already working and you must go to them and find the ones who are disenchanted with their culture or their opportunity.
With common interview-to-selection ratios of 6:1, it’s important to keep the top of the funnel full of potential recruits. So, sales managers should go out into the marketplace, look for candidates, and build prospect files of potential people as new recruits. This will make their candidate pool increase in quality, because it doesn’t just depend on marketing.
Getting Active in the Community
Often, your best reps and community centers of influence are good starting points. Picture this. You spend the next several weeks focused on developing relationships with many people you know and respect—sales trainers, BNI group leaders, chamber directors and others in the area. You explain what you have and gain their support in helping you find high quality people.
The number of people you interview drops. However, the number of high quality people you see goes up. You spend most of your time nurturing and developing your network. As a result, you primarily spend screening and interviewing time with high-quality candidates.
A personal network in your community opens up a proven path to successful recruiting. It can provide enough high quality candidates to keep your prospecting funnel full of new hire potential. Great recruiting begins with getting the names of quality candidates. (Quality is more important than quantity.) To do this well, it is important to keep developing your network of individuals who look for and refer high-quality candidates.
Asking for Help Finding People
Remember, people like to help when you ask them to help you. This is especially true if they already like you and your business. It gives them a great feeling to point other good people your way.
Here’s your first task. Ask yourself these questions, “Who are the people who can help me find others? Who are the people I can meet with, that see area reps all the time, who will like my business and what we do?”
To start with, set up appointments and meet with them. Tell them about what you do, your culture, and the position you have open. Ask for their help. Develop your first eight referral sources. Join an area networking group like BNI.
You can do this and your results will be a higher candidate pool and more outstanding salespeople to hire and work for your company. We want to help you. So, reach out to us if you have any questions!