Sales Hiring Managers and Recruiters are Completely Misaligned on this Key Sales Hiring Metric

Sales is the lifeblood of business. So it should go without saying that hiring capable salespeople to fill out your team and help your company grow is critically important. But how do you ensure you always hit the mark with that next hire? 

We realize that sales leaders are constantly under pressure to hire fast and hire well. For this reason, Sciolytix recently partnered with SellingPower® on a survey to identify challenges and best practices in sales hiring. To gain the most comprehensive insight possible, we surveyed sales leaders, recruiters, and sales reps to better understand their unique — and at times opposing — perceptions, expectations, and preferences.

Today’s post is one in a series of articles to share what we’re learning.

What are your top recruiting priorities?

We asked sales recruiters and sales hiring managers this question, and as you can see from the graph, there are several priorities to consider when it comes to the sales hiring process:

• Improving quality of hire
• Accelerating time to full productivity
• Growing talent pipeline
• Improving time to hire
• Increasing new hire retention rate
• Improving diversity
• Reducing cost per hire

We found that sales recruiters (seen in gold) and sales hiring managers (seen in blue) agree that improving the quality of hires and growing the talent pipeline are top priorities. However, while sales hiring managers are concerned with accelerating the time it takes to get a new hire up to speed so that they start producing, this factor doesn’t register in quite the same way with sales recruiters. In fact, recruiters don’t pay any attention to it.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, recruiters aren’t thinking, “Here’s a candidate, but are they ready to do the job, or will additional training be required?” They merely want to get enough interested candidates hired, which in today’s world can be complicated. But you can see this as a potential source of tension between the two roles.

Interestingly, while retention and diversity get attention in the media, they are much lower priorities in the sales world. Also, reducing cost per hire is among the lowest priorities. This implies that the pain of an open position far exceeds the cost of filling that position. Bottom line: everyone is willing to pay to fill roles with quality candidates. 

Please check back with us as we share more about this insightful survey. Download the full survey report here!

What are you doing to improve your sales hiring process?

Sciolytix Sales Performance Predictor (S2P2) is an award-winning candidate assessment tool that utilizes 3D avatar-based simulations to measure and predict a candidate’s performance in an unbiased manner. Think of it as a video game — sales candidates play a video game that reflects the real-world selling situations they will face in their new sales role and, through artificial intelligence, predict their effectiveness. This groundbreaking technology helps sales leaders:

1. Hire top-performing reps quickly
2. Minimize the risk of bad hires
3. Position themselves as an employer of choice with applicants 

Bottom line, we are revolutionizing the way organizations hire, onboard, develop talent, and create a fair hiring process for all. Predictive simulations are the latest enhancement we’re adding to that arsenal of products.