Avoid These 3 Mistakes When Hiring in Sales | Crawford Thomas Recruiting

If you’re not using a Recruiting Firm, you could be making these 3 mistakes when hiring in sales.

Crawford Thomas Recruiting specializes in sales recruitment. This allows our team the opportunity to research and study the sales hiring-market. Each sales candidate is going to be different, however the process to get them hired should remain in routine. If you avoid these common mistakes when making a decision to hire a new sales professional, you’ll land a candidate that is well qualified and will produce for your company.

Below are 3 common mistakes employers make during a hiring process.

Fancy Resumes

Having a well written resume with numerous accomplishments and sales awards is great, that means this candidate was successful, someplace else. There are questions that remain such as, how much of it is true, and how are you going to prove it? How does it relate to your company? Rather than spending too much time on a sales candidate’s resume, start digging into their soft skills. This is your opportunity to ask your candidate questions that will reveal their true professionalism. Have they done research on your company? How well do they handle stressful situations? What’s their body language like? These are all soft skills that cannot be measured on a resume. Being a sales recruiter for so long, I would always ask my candidates “How much do you know about your potential employer?” It’s questions like this that will show your candidate’s true engagement in the process. You’ll want to filter out the candidates that have not taken the time to learn more about the company they’re interviewing for.

Reference Checks

According to Select International “This goes for any position, not just sales roles. References are almost never negative. Think about it—would you ask an individual you were not friendly with to be a character witness for a future boyfriend or girlfriend? I think not. This is essentially what job applicants are doing; they are attracting perspective companies for their services and putting their best foot forward. References are a necessary last step in your hiring process, but not one that holds much water.” My opinion on the matter, either find a better way to check references or do away with them completely. You’re not going to find one reference that would hurt the candidate’s chances at being hired.

Interviewing Their Past

“These are salespeople after all and an interview is the perfect forum for a candidate to sell themselves. They have a captive audience and if they are remotely good at sales they can sell something they should know better than anyone else: themselves. Interviews are an essential selection piece, both from a data-gathering standpoint and for the hiring manager’s own approval. However, interviews, along with reference checks, should be completed as part of a more robust and less subjective selection process.” Asking questions about their future is a great remedy for this mistake. When you ask about a candidate’s future, they must answer with honesty and ambition. These questions can reveal a lot about their goals, their organizational skills, and will allow you to see if they are looking to be with your company for the foreseeable future. Think about it like this, would you ask a date to describe their previous relationships?

One of the reasons Crawford Thomas Recruiting has been extremely successful in sales recruiting is because of our pre-screens. When we deliver a qualified candidate to you, as the employer, you can feel comfort knowing we have already built a rapport with these individuals. We pre-screen each and every submittal with multiple phone calls. Each call contains a series of different questions, so that when our clients are ready to interview, we are delivering well-qualified candidates to represent Crawford Thomas Recruiting. We would not send you a candidate that we didn’t feel was going to be a good representation of our brand, or yours!

Bonus

The biggest mistake of all is not using Crawford Thomas Recruiting to assist in your sales recruitment process.