Recruit Using Sales Headhunters

Sales professionals are a dime a dozen, but to ensure your company hires only the best and brightest, it’s a good idea to start the selection and recruitment process by consulting with sales headhunters. These are organizations and people with skill and experience in finding and hiring sales professionals who are most likely the best fit for your company and industry.

Recruiting your business development staff using sales headhunters would usually be as simple as giving the headhunter a list of your requirements, where to get in touch with you, and your deadline. Here are a few tips in making sure the recruiting and hiring process is a success.

Define your requirements. When recruiting through a headhunter, remember that the headhunting staff might not necessarily be 100% in sync with what you have in mind for a sales personnel. If you just tell them a generic and basic set of skills you need, then they will do a broad search, and it will be more difficult to screen these selections. You can break down your requirements into the following.

• Experience: How experienced do you want candidates to be? Should they be working in your field for two years? Three? Or more?
• Management capability: Headhunters can be instructed to specifically target people currently in management positions. This will be helpful if you are looking to add to your managerial staff.
• Logistics:Headhunters can look for people within a specific locality only, or they can also look farther away, if you are willing to pay for relocation, or if you are looking into expanding the area of your business’ coverage.

Are you a Pirate?

Are you looking to hire currently employed personnel? Headhunters are known for “pirating” individuals or even teams who are currently in gainful employment. You should state at the outset if you are looking into pursuing people working for other companies in your industry, or if you simply want to select from individuals who are presently looking for employment. Several headhunting companies also run databases of people who might be good matches, or people who submit their credentials into job search websites.

Will you Disclose your Business’ Identity?

Headhunters can recruit people with the premise that the company hiring is anonymous, at least initially. You can instruct the sales headhunters to post advertisements and to contact potential candidates by giving a generic description of your business, and not specify your company name itself. This protects their interests, because of the risk that potential candidates will bypass them and apply straight with you. This also protects your interests, because applicants or potential candidates don’t have initial biases when it comes to the company prospectively hiring them.

What to do Once Recruits are Found, Screened and Hired

Once potential recruits are screened, these applicants will then be passed on to your own human resources for your own screening and potential hiring. Depending on your agreement with the sales headhunting company or individual, you might be paying the equivalent of one month of the hiree’s salary as their headhunting fee. This might be a steep cost in the short run, but considering the quality of the skills, network and talent of your newly hired sales professional, the potential sales and earnings would more than outweigh the headhunter’s fees.