How to Hire the Best in Breed Sales and Marketing in Today’s Talent Market

Your systems and operations have proven themselves, and your products and services sell. Your final, and arguably most important component for business optimization, is a sales and marketing team to get you the right customers.

The landscape for elite talent is always a seller’s market. You will be in competition with your industry’s usual suspects, upstarts with funding and the gig economy. Let’s take a look at the hiring ideas that used to work, how those ideas have changed and what you can do about right now.

The Traditional Hiring Process for Sales and Marketing

In previous business generations, HR had the leverage to cast a wide net, catch everything and pick through the spoils. A good job description was enough as long as it was wired through the proper channels. Trade magazines, newspapers and other local media played a large role in connecting workers to companies, and the limitations in distribution created a natural filter that helped weed out unqualified prospects.

As the Internet began to play more of a role in the hiring process, the hiring process began to slowly change. Job listings were more freely available with less filters on who could view them, meaning that every listing received more attention. Entry-level positions were saturated with replies, while upper level positions became more prone to receive unqualified responses. More companies opted to hire independent contractors and employ virtual assistance instead of limiting their search to local areas. Not all HR professionals were privy to the same technology at once, and so found themselves behind a mountain of CVs — many of them highly unspecific to the position.

Although the digital transformation of the hiring process brought with it many advantages, many companies found themselves unable to fully optimize into the new paradigm. The hiring process had to change in order to keep up with new technologies.

How Hiring has Changed

Savvy companies now realize that they have to filter and secure the hiring process much more precisely than ever before. The number of channels that a listing moves through no longer matters as much as the quality of those channels. It is more important to direct the right eyes to a job description, and it is just as important to present the company as an employer of choice.

Relying on job boards is no longer sufficient for elite sales and marketing professionals. Great salespeople know great salespeople. If you know the people who know great salespeople (the right hiring partner), then you will get great salespeople.

The type of employee that receives priority has also changed. Marketing and sales are more technical than ever before. Sales strategies are defined by industry. Successful companies are building candidate profiles to match their strategies before sending out even one listing. Constructing the DNA of your preferred prospect also gives you the ability to use the best parts of hiring’s digital transformation — keywording, automated behavioral analysis and quantifying the personality of your prospects instead of shooting from the hip about culture fit.

The Advantages of Working with a Third Party Recruiter

Is your in house HR department equipped to incorporate digital automation into the prospect intake process? How much research do you have time to do into building candidate profiles, and can you afford to misinterpret your input data as you build them? Do you have a list of great salesmen that you can call to attract more great salesmen into your fold, and have you audited your company culture to ensure that your company’s daily experience aligns with what today’s top employees prefer?

Accomplishing the goals above may be a bit much for a company that has not completed its own digital transformation. Even if you have, it can be difficult to put the appropriate scale of resources into the hiring process and your daily operations. The solution — a partner that understands the details of digital transformation in the sales and marketing industry and knows how to target the right employees for you.

Today’s hiring process is a hybrid effort between the company’s internal HR department and plugged-in third party executive professionals. You need the right team to hire the right team. Make sure that you delegate the details of hiring to those with experience so that your business runs smoothly through the upgrade.