5 ways to shorten your sales recruitment process

Do you know your average time-to-hire? For many organisations, it’s an essential KPI that can shed light on how efficient your sales recruitment process is. With data from Workable revealing it takes a whopping 47 days to fill sales vacancies—not including the time required to get someone up to speed—it’s clear that companies must focus on reducing this figure.

How does your process compare?

Before diving into the fixes, benchmark your current performance. Use our calculator to see if your time-to-hire is working for you or against you:

The longer it takes to fill an open job, the more repercussions your business faces. Lengthy vacancies increase your cost-per-hire, reduce productivity, and make hitting targets harder. Here is how to ensure your process isn’t negatively impacting your year.

Audit your sales recruitment process

The average cost of an unfilled vacancy varies, but in sales, it can be especially damaging. Every day a patch is uncovered is a day of lost revenue.

The first step is to ensure every stage of your journey is essential. Do you need four interview rounds, or can you condense them? Does a senior stakeholder need to be involved in the initial screening?

Take the first step toward efficiency:

Get Your Free Hiring Audit Here — Use our comprehensive audit to identify bottlenecks and streamline your path to the best talent.

Reduce processing time

Our sales index shows that 58% of candidates have an interview after being on the market for two weeks. Whether that interview is with your organisation or not is up to you. Plan your recruitment process carefully to ensure you’re not spending an unnecessarily long time on vetting and decision-making. The world of sales can often be a candidate-driven market and complicated assessments, lengthy periods between recruitment stages and delays to arrange interviews can all cost you potential sales superstars. Even if you do end up securing the right person, down time between interviews and key decisions all add up to a longer period without someone on patch generating leads and revenue.

Sell yourself

You could have the best benefits, work environment and opportunities in the world, but if you’re not selling them to potential sales people then you’re unlikely to fill your roles with the best talent. Take the time to create a killer job description that sets you apart from competitors and attracts the best sales candidates.

The ‘sell’ of a job also comes during the interview stage. Are your hiring managers doing an effective job of putting your company and the role in the best possible light? Train all interviewers to sell your company and, in turn, they should expect candidates to effectively demonstrate their own sales skills. Discover more tips for improving your interviewing skills.

Plan ahead

If you know you’ll have vacancies coming up in the coming months, start planning your recruitment time and resources now. This is particularly important if you require more senior or busy staff members to be involved in the sales recruitment process. Block out calendars for interviews well in advance (this includes meeting rooms and post-interview chats with managers) and ensure you plan around when key managers and stakeholders have holidays booked. It’s also a good idea to speak to your recruiters well in advance – if you know you’re going to need to fill a sales vacancy at some stage during the year, let us know so we can start looking for the best talent for your organisation.

Don’t delay offers

According to Glassdoor Chief Economist Andrew Chamberlain, companies take an average of 23 days to screen and hire new employees – nearly twice as long as they did in 2010. It’s understandable that you want to ensure you get the right candidate and don’t make mistakes, but taking too long to make an offer to someone could prove to be more costly.

Taking a few days to make your decision is fine, but if you take weeks, you’ll likely lose talented sales people. According to the BMS Index, 25% of salespeople gain an interview in their first week of actively searching. In their second, 50% will have had one or two interviews. By the end of the first month of active searching 76% will have gone to up to five job interviews. So if you don’t snap up top sales people within a couple of weeks of interviews, you could lose them for good.

Next steps

The above steps can help you dramatically overhaul your sales recruitment process and ultimately reduce the time you spend recruiting sales people. For more advice and information, check out our performance hub or contact us.