By: Cube Management
Let's talk about the importance of using good recruiting practices to hire top performing sales and marketing professionals in today's economy. It's not a secret that the economy is on a sustained growth path for the last several years. What that has caused is much higher employment. We're down to almost 5 % in Oregon, but even nation wide the number is even less than that. And if you look at the unemployment figure, that includes all of the structural unemployment. So, the fact is, most really talented people, particularly top producers in top companies in the sales and marketing fields, are all fully employed. That means it's going to be very difficult for you to hire top A-type producers in sales and marketing from placing ads strictly on the job instead of just Monster.com or Career builder or other such job boards. It's just not possible to find the best candidates and get them to come to work for your company though such tactics anymore.
In order to find really top sales and marketing talent, whether it be VP, director level, marketing manager, sales manager, down to entry level telesales personnel, you're going to have to go into your competition and find those people and extract them and get them to work for your company. This is why using a recruiter can really be of value. If you don't have the wherewithall, the time, or perhaps the desire to go calling blinding into your competition it makes really good sense to bring on a professional headhunting or recruiting firm that can actually perform that activity for you. Headhunters aren't needed, on the other hand, for finding really easy to find or easy to fill positions. But unfortunately, in sales and marketing, it's always a challenge because the top producers are always working. Those people who get results in sales are very hard to come by. Companies covet them and they pay them well and they want to keep them and retain them. So as economy heats up, employee retention is a key element to most company's strategy to growth.
If you're trying to grow your business and trying to add additional top sales and marketing talent, you're going to need to find a way to find and locate those top sales and marketing producers from other companies and convince them to come to work for you. That's the fastest way to take market share from your competition is by recruiting away top sales and marketing people from your competitor. How do you go about finding a good recruiting firm for this? Well, start by isolating on recruiting companies that really specialize is sales and marketing and the recruiting of those types of functions within companies. There's a lot of generic recruiting and headhunting firms out there that claim to be experts at sales and marketing but when you dig deeper you'll find out they usually don't have nearly as much in-depth expertise for doing sales and marketing recruiting as you might suspect.
Why is it important to seek a specialized recurring company for this purpose? Hiring sales and marketing people is completely different that hiring engineering talent, IT professionals or other operations or finance types of positions. It's very easy to be fooled when it comes to hiring sales people. Most sales people do a good job of selling themselves through the interview process and as a result, for the untrained eye, it's really easy to make a hiring mistake because, even though they sell themselves well through the interview process, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to sell well for your company. So this is one of the reasons why you want to focus on getting a recruiting company that has a specialized practice in hiring sales and marketing talent. They go well beyond asking the typical questions and use advanced behavior interviewing and screening techniques, as well as sales aptitude and marketing aptitude profiling techniques, to separate the A players; in other words, the real top producers, from the rest of the field. So if you're going to go out and try to recruit sales and marking talent in a full economy such as what were experiencing now, you should strongly consider using a recruiting firm that has special skills in this area.
Once you find that firm, really scrutinize their process to make sure that it's rigorous and it includes such things as sales aptitude profiling and testing. Profiling the actual sales person's achievement history over the last several years to show how well the person has actually performed against quota and also performing in depth background checks in interviews to really ascertain whether or not the person is capable at the levels that they claim to. These are just some of the things you should think about as you think about hiring a recruiting firm for hiring sales and marketing talent in a full economy
This article was posted on January 28, 2006
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