Sales Candidates – How to Get the Ones You Want

  • July 14, 2007
  • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
  • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t get an email or a call from someone, attempting to hire salespeople, where they are complaining about either the lack of candidates or the lack of hirable candidates. This week, rather than advising clients, I conducted a turn-key recruiting project myself.  Here are the results for the first 4 days:

173 Resumes
90 Local Candidates
55 Took Objective Management Group’s Candidate Assessment
 34 Hirable Candidates
20 Hirable Candidates Screened by Phone
6 Great Candidates Scheduled for Interviews

So what’s up?  Why did I get a ton of resumes?  Why were so many of them hirable? Why do I have such good candidates to interview?

It all starts with knowing the challenges your candidates will face, along with knowing what it will take for them to succeed.

From this list of criteria, you can write the killer ad that describes your candidate and the desired experiences.  In my experience, 95% of the companies screw up the killer ad and end up posting a very typical ad.

Then, you must know where to post the ad as well as the way the site’s search engines work.  With Monster.com, you must know how to use each field and drop down list so that your ad comes up with the appropriate search key words.  If they don’t see it, they can’t respond to it.

Next, your candidates must be assessed.  This not only weeds out those who won’t succeed, it identifies more hirable candidates than you would ever identify for yourself because you’re probably looking at their resumes instead.

Then, hirable candidates must be screened by phone.  In under 5 minutes you can make sure your candidates have the experience that meets the criteria included in your ad, and sound the way you would want someone representing your company to sound.

The top scoring candidates are invited in for the first interview.  It’s then, for the first time, that the resume comes out.

This process works but you must be able to nail the ad, work the job site, and use the OMG Assessment.

(c) Copyright 2007 Objective Management Group, Inc.