To win the talent championship, don’t make job sites or boards your talent sourcing starting point for your open sales and marketing positions.
We’re not saying it’s impossible to find A-players from job sites like LinkedIn or Indeed. You’re probably using this as your hiring strategy because it worked in the past. But when you want to efficiently build an elite team, you need a consistent pipeline of talent.
That’s not what platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed provide
To see why, think of posting a job online like a college sports team that holds open tryouts. Anyone can show up and try to score a spot. Coaches aren’t looking for the centerpiece of their team in this environment.
You have the opposite expectation – and that’s problematic.
Why Job Sites and Boards Are Ineffective Hiring Strategies
The entire purpose of creating a job description, outlining requirements and benefits, then posting it online is to fill a role with the best possible candidate. With their open-to-all structure, sites like LinkedIn or Indeed make it harder for you to achieve your goal.
When you post a job, you envision finding your ideal candidate
The picture is probably based on the most successful sales or marketing person you ever hired, a driven professionals with grit and business-generating skillsets. You think about the value they added to the team and imagine having 2 or 3 people exactly like that.
You get stuck wading through unqualified candidates
Qualified or not, people will apply. The average job posting attracts hundreds of applications (or potentially over 1,000 if the job is remote).
You, or someone on your team, is forced to sort through all the resumes, cover letters, and any other information you gathered to winnow the pool of applicants down to the contenders.
Hiring distracts you and your team from core operations
Then you’re on to scheduling interviews, checking references, testing their skills – basically evaluating the candidate to see if they’re a good fit. This stretches on for weeks.
100+ days lost
Our internal data shows the average time to hire sales and marketing professionals is 109 days. Are you willing to devote that much of your limited time to hiring strategies and process?
The longer the hiring process lasts, the more you lose
You know that every day you spend looking for this employee is another day you go without a critical team player. Dragging out the process costs you new business. Eventually, you’re forced to stop searching and settle for someone who can’t perform at this high level, leading to lost revenue.
It’s a stressful situation, which unfortunately exacerbates your hiring problems.
Studies show stress alters how we make decisions
It can make us more impulsive and lead us to enter high-risk scenarios. Or it can completely freeze our decision-making abilities. We enter analysis-paralysis and stew over possibilities without acting.
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Don’t bet your season on open tryouts
Elite programs aren’t relying on this as a strategy to build a team that can win the title – they might not even hold tryouts, and neither should you.
How To Emulate Elite Sports Programs When Hiring
Coaches and their staff don’t sit back and hope the best players will apply to attend their school and then try out for the program. They proactively pursue the highest caliber athletes in the country.
Why wouldn’t you do the same? For you, that translates into skipping the job board and working with a talent acquisition company.
Minimize your involvement and access working and winning candidates
Scouts are critical to the success of any college athletic program. Head coaches don’t go out and evaluate every possible player for their roster. They send scouts to vet athletes. The coach only gets involved in person after they’ve seen proof of a player’s prowess.
At ProActivate, we are your talent sourcing “scouts”
Our talent acquisition managers find passive candidates to fill open positions for our partners. These sales and marketing professionals are carefully vetted using our in-depth qualification process.
We evaluate skillset and mindset based on criteria we establish with you. (You can read exactly how we do it here.)
The qualified candidates we pass along are ready to win
Choosing which one to hire will probably be the hardest decision you have to make. That was the experience of the Vice President of Freeman Companies who told us, “I’ve been so impressed with the interviews … I would have hired them both!”
Have a Winning Talent Sourcing and Hiring Strategy: Partner With Us
No one starts the hiring process hoping to recruit a C-player to their team.
Whether you’re looking for an entry-level salesperson or an experienced executive leader, rely on our talent sourcing experts to find your next A-player.