Weather Recruitment Challenges: Make Your Talent an Advantage
Categories: Talent Management | Podcasts
The past few years led to drastic shifts in hiring and recruitment process, impacting organizations of all sizes and in all industries. More recently, it has been imperative that organizations have a strategic approach in order to hire and retain top performers. Ensure you’re hiring the right talent for growth and at the same time creating an environment that supports your people’s success.
Your Questions Answered: Your Sales Organization’s Talent Strategy
In this episode of the Revenue Builders podcast, hosts John Kaplan and John McMahon talk to Mike McSally, an accomplished business leader with deep expertise in aligning people, operations and technology. They dig deep into the current state of recruitment and how company leaders can retain top employees and improve hiring efforts. We asked McSally some of the most pressing questions sales leaders have about talent right now.
Where do leaders go wrong with their current talent?
Successful executive chefs create other great chefs. They don’t keep people in their restaurant as long as possible as line cooks or sous-chefs. Think of your leadership style and your manager's actions in the same way. Organizations with top talent are the ones who have sales leaders and managers that invest significant amounts of time developing and supporting their direct reports and salespeople.
People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.
Life is busy and the urgency around hitting the number never dissipates. The more you can help people achieve their personal goals — the more trust you will build in that relationship. No coach, whether it’s sports or sales, becomes a great coach just by being a great player of their game. It takes practice, experience (often some failures) and support from those who’ve done it before in order to become a manager that drives front-line results.
Your most valuable managers will make it their mission to help their people progress in their careers without the fear of losing them or losing their revenue numbers. In my experience, the more you genuinely care in a person’s career progression the longer and tighter the relationship you will have with that person over a lifetime.
How do you make sure your talent process is differentiated?
Despite what you and your managers are feeling, there has never been a better (albeit more dangerous) time to recruit great talent. Top sales talent is willing to listen to why they should work for your organization.
What is the story that you know and believe will be attractive to the types of people you want on your team? What will scare the wrong people off? As a sales leader, you need to own your talent management process. Ownership is the first step you can take to make your talent process successful. The first thing I often do when working with sales leaders and managers is coach them on owning their talent process and making it unique to their business.
Don’t make the mistake of relying solely on human resources to navigate the recruiting process for new sellers. Regular evaluation of your talent and hiring process are critical to successfully managing and growing revenue year after year. Think through these two critical areas of your talent approach:
- Define the right candidates specific for your organization.
You likely have an ideal company profile that your sales team uses to capture highly-qualified leads. Similarly, create a success profile for your sales talent. Provide your managers with that profile to ensure they’re recruiting highly qualified talent for your organization.
Each company is different. You may have competitors with similar solutions, but your sales process, internal structure, and solution capabilities, they’re all differentiated. With different nuances, what makes someone successful in your organization may be different from what made that candidate successful in other sales organizations.
Your ideal candidate should also be defined by the capabilities and attributions that will make them successful in your sales organization. Start thinking about what those capabilities and attributes look like for your reps, BDR/SDRs, front-line managers, etc. and give your managers a framework they can hire and coach for.
- Treat the recruiting process like the sales process.
Keep in mind, the candidate experience starts from the very first interaction they have with your company. Do you have a defined candidate recruitment experience and steps in place to create value for that candidate and interest in your organization?
Just like sellers need to set certain expectations in the sales process to reduce customer churn, so too should your hiring managers, to avoid employee churn and the costs that come along with a bad hire. Use the recruitment process to set expectations and be transparent. Your managers will be qualifying in the right candidates, as those candidates are qualifying your organization. In hiring/recruitment conversations, encourage your managers to discuss things that are going well in your organization and areas that they will be leaning on new hires to come in and help with. Transparency will help your managers find people that align with your culture, core values and team needs.
Dig Deeper Into How to Hire Top Talent
Navigating recruitment and talent challenges have become frequent topics on the Revenue Builders Podcast with John McMahon and John Kaplan. Hear their full conversation with Mike McSally on weathering recruitment challenges. See how you can adjust your recruitment process and ensure you’re spending your time and resources on the right people for growth.