Mistakes to avoid when trying to hire top sales talent: #1
It’s common to make a poor first impression, and this will bounce your top candidates. But there’s a simple way to fix this: address your candidates directly.
The quality of talent your company is able to hire and deploy is the most important discipline and the only sustainable competitive advantage for your business.
But hiring managers and their recruiting teams make drastic mistakes - every day - when hiring top sales talent. This makes profitable revenue growth even harder.
From the job posting to the final round of face to face interviews, your business is affected by huge dollars in combined costs and missed opportunities. Here are a few things going wrong and how to fix them.
Many will post a boring job description, which spells out someone’s duties and responsibilities line by boring line, instead of an exciting job post that, when well written, will have that top candidates vying for a spot in the interview lineup. Here are 4 quick tips for an effective job post that attracts that top decile candidate:
Use a killer job title:
a. Client Success vs Account Management
b. New Client Experience vs Business Development
c. Solutions Architect vs Sales Engineer
Address reader directly (“In this role, you will…”) and avoid using third person language (“The ideal candidate is…”)
Avoid meaningless buzzwords like “innovative” and “self-motivated”. Instead, use this limited whitespace to show role candidates unique challenges and the reward for solving them. Perhaps even describe the legendary team they’ll be joining. Winners like winners.
Cycle or refresh the posting at least weekly to avoid a stale post. I strongly recommend including a note like, “due to volume of applicants, this posting will be removed in 5 days”