From Impossible To Inevitable

Chapter 12Hiring Best Practices for Sales

Your people and culture determine your destiny.

Simple Hiring Tricks

Predictable Recruiting (with Jon Bischke, CEO, Entelo)

You can take almost all the ideas in this book, especially around Nailing A Niche, lead generation, and sales specialization, and apply them to how you recruit. It's just another form of marketing and selling.

Specialization: Just like the fastest-growing SaaS companies have divided customer-facing functions into roles like outbound prospecting, inbound lead response, closing, and Customer Success, you can do the same thing on the recruiting front. You should have sales development or prospectors (sourcers), closing (recruiters and hiring managers), and “postsales” (HR or people ops).

Measure activities, conversion rates, and elapsed time at each stage of the recruiting funnel. Your outbound recruiting team, the sourcers, focus on reaching out to a set number of candidates each week the same way you have activity metrics for sales prospectors. You can track things like message response rates (whether over email or social), phone conversations per week, how often candidates are clicking on links you send them, which templates are performing best, and so forth.

If you know your hiring plan, your conversion rates at each stage (e.g., phone screen, first onsite, second onsite, offer letter, etc.), average time in each stage, and what's required to close your top candidates, you can back into how many candidates you ...