If you’re a recruiter who hires salespeople for business clients, you can find yourself in a tricky position. You need to make sure you’re offering something concrete that attracts potential hires, and you have to make sure that these hires make worthwhile additions that help your clients and companies grow. It’s a lot of responsibility, so you want to make sure you do it right. Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to ensure these processes run as efficiently as possible.
Tip#1: Establish a Benchmark
First, a common benchmark for recruits has to be established with your client. In sales, benchmarks are goals that your client is trying to reach—needs that prospective hires have to fill. These can include hard standards like skills and a measure success/failure rate, or it can include personality traits like characteristics and attitudes. Benchmarks are useful in formulating job descriptions and interview questions.
If you aren’t using benchmarks in your recruiting process, it’s destined to fail. Click To Tweet
These benchmarks can be established by you, or the client can even offer it up themselves. Either way works as long as the benchmark is there, and it meets your client’s core needs.
Tip#2: Create Assessments
When recruiting salespeople, you want to make sure you’re asking the right questions. Even before scheduling any interviews, you’ll want to send questionnaires to promising candidates—this will help you gauge qualities that will be most helpful to your client.
To create a satisfactory assessment—one that will bring out a hire’s most useful qualities—sit down with some client stakeholders and brainstorm some questions based on your client’s most pressing needs. Put together the best questions into a formal assessment, and you’ll have a useful recruitment tool at your hands.
Use assessments to determine a recruit’s strengths and weaknesses. #recruitingprotip Click To Tweet
Tip#3: Compare Assessment Results with Benchmarks
In today’s age, there are lots of ways to find potential hires—referrals, emails, calls, social networks, etc. Once you have put together a list of promising recruits, send them your clients’ assessments. When all of them are completed, compare their answers to the benchmarks your client set during step 1. Do the recruits’ answers indicate that they’re suitable for a sales position? Does it appear as though they will be able to satisfy the company’s needs? Will they contribute to satisfactory growth?
In general, this is all a pretty methodical process. However, it’s a method that suits this industry the best—it’s all sales, after all. This may seem like a lengthy process, but it will help bring in the best salespeople, much to the satisfaction of your clients.
