Being a Sales Manager in a growing and ever expanding team, one of your key responsibilities would be to ensure you hire the right folks in your team. Any wrong hire to your team can severely impact your revenue goals and also put you behind your current stage making it difficult for you to recover. In addition to that, it also impacts your overall team motivation and confidence, ultimately hampering their performance as well.
Though you cannot always ensure you hire the best, you can definitely make sure you hire the right candidate having the right attitude and hunger to succeed in sales.
Here are some of the must have sales hiring best practices you should follow to hire the right candidates for your team.
1. Be specific and accurate while giving the Job description:
Hiring Managers sometimes tend to be lazy in writing detailed job descriptions of the position and leave it at the mercy of the recruiters. While an experienced recruiter will certainly ensure to write a correct job description based on their past experience, they may not be aware of the specific nuances of the job roles. Recruiter may post the job with generic job description applicable for the sales roles, which may lack certain descriptive information about the roles and responsibilities expected out of the candidate.
Ultimately this leads to hiring wrong candidates who tend to know about additional things later and feel unhappy about it if the expectation doesn’t match. Hence it is important for the Hiring manager to provide specific and accurate information while giving the Job description of the position. If the job requires any specific expectations, ensure to explicitly mention it so that it attracts the right candidate and helps the recruiter close the position faster.
2. Get involved in Sourcing efforts as well
Hiring managers who leverage their networks to hire candidates tend to get more qualified profiles than those who rely only on the efforts of the recruitment team. Share in your social media that you are hiring on the listed positions and ask for your networks to refer anyone whom they might know. Candidates who come through the referral sources tend to have lesser drop out rates and they are more likely to stay with you longer.
Though it doesn’t guarantee 100% commitment, it does ensure both you and the candidate understand the work culture and expectations well in advance and ensure the candidate is aligned as per the expectations. This helps avoid any unexpected surprises later and ensures the work goes on smoothly.
3. Have a structured assessment process for Interviews
Very often we observe that different interviewers are sent for different interviews for the same positions based on the availability of the interviewers. In these cases, Sales Managers should ensure they have a structured evaluation process and parameters on which the candidate needs to be assessed.
Otherwise in case if there is no structure of the interview questions and evaluation process, different interviewers may rate the candidates differently and the scores arrived may be subjective in nature. Subjective scores without any common process for all candidates can never be the right measure to compare the candidates.
4. Rely more on Future potential than on Past performance.
Many interviewers tend to be a bit biased and evaluate candidates only based on their past performance. The bias comes because of a thought process that if the candidate has done good in the past, he will do good in future and if the candidate has not done any good in the past, they cannot do any good in future as well. While this remains a valid measure in the majority of cases, exceptions do exist.
Being successful in sales requires the right attitude, hunger to succeed as well as interest in the product they sell. If they have keen interest in what they sell, they can quickly learn and succeed irrespective of how they did in the past. Hence ensure to hire more based on the future potential of the candidates than their past performance.
I hope you loved reading these essential tips for Sales hiring.
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