Posted by: Peter Marinilli, CPC, CSP
As I’ve mentioned before, job offers and their accompanying employment perks and benefit packages need to be tailored to the candidate you really want to hire if you want to build a successful sales force. Ute Gass makes this point in her Recruiter Training Blog:
“Every individual has unique needs and wants and recruiters should gain insights into every candidates "sweet spot" to make the offer appealing to the prospective candidate.”
An effective sales recruiter needs to know the candidate, and the sales job opportunity being offered, inside and out. Too often, recruiters and employers try to fit an available candidate to a job, instead of a job to a qualified and desirable candidate. A much wiser strategy is to make the position available match the skills and personality of the candidate you want to work for you. To do this, a sales recruiter needs to gain a clear understanding of the people they interview and what they are looking for. Two questions immediately get at their career motivations:
Why are you looking to leave your current company? What would you do if your company made you a counteroffer? Your interviewees' answers to these questions will tell you what they are looking to get out of the sales job opportunity you are offering, and what it will take to make an offer they will accept. Learn to ask questions like these, then really listen and interpret the answers—your success rate is sure to rise.
Add Comment (0)Posted by: Peter Marinilli, CPC, CSP
No one can deny the internet’s impact on professional sales recruitment, and social networks such as MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook, to name a few, have added another dimension to this powerful communication medium. These networks are only beginning to be recognized for the valuable recruiting resource that they are, arguably more so than traditional online resume postings and job boards.
Robert Scoble calls Facebook “the modern day Rolodex,” and I’d have to agree. Like any recruiting method, setting up an account and adapting to the Facebook format takes time, but the payoff is tremendous, once you know what you’re doing. In professional sales recruitment, mastery of Facebook (or similar sites) will soon be a required skill.
The beauty of Facebook is in the wealth of information freely supplied by its users and wide variety of search functions. An active “Facebooker” will include enough information about their work experience and personality to make it seem like you know them, before you’ve even spoken.
Social networks encourage users to reveal personal details well beyond the standard academic major and degree information found in a resume or cover letter. Photos, lengthy likes and dislikes lists and personal commenting features provide a very telling description of a candidate as both a person and an employee.
What does this mean for a job placement firm? Free networking connections and a lot of time saved, for starters. Most of these sites are free to join, and once you're familiar with the functionality, you can save a lot of time screening potential candidates before you even call them back. Take the time to join one or two of these social networks and you're almost certain to see the quality of your candidates improve.
