How to build a selection engine for hiring the best salespeople [Part 2: Sourcing talent]

We were joined by our friends at Teamtailor to discuss hiring the best talent at scale for your B2B tech startups. Sales for Startups’ Founder & CEO, James Ker-Reid, unpacked the topic with their Head of Partnerships, Fredrik Mellander.

(If you missed Part 1 that looked at introducing the topic and the use of scorecards, you can find that here. If you’d rather watch the session, click here to view the recording via our YouTube channel.)

Sourcing talent

There are so many means of doing this, whether it’s:

  • Using recruiters
  • Using your referral network
  • Using hackathons (particularly for those in Dev)
  • Using pitch competitions (particularly for those in Sales)

Despite the variety, they share a common end goal. Know that you know who you’re hiring and how you’re going to measure them in the process, how do you get this influx of great candidates into your pipeline?

Fredrik told us:

‘When you look at the different ways of sourcing talent, I think you need to break it down into three different categories:

1. Reach the candidates wherever they are. 

How you do that will depend on the type of company you are, your budget, etc., as there are a lot of different ways of doing this. That could be through, but not limited to:

  • Traditional advertising via the different jobs boards [e.g. the image above]
  • Recruiting companies
  • Referral networks
  • Marketing campaigns
  • Student fairs and universities

As there are a variety of options, you need to do your homework. You need to have built your scorecard to understand what type of person you’re looking for, and from that you’re able to understand where that person is likely to exist.

Multiple roles mean multiple options – don’t think that posting on Indeed (for example) for two completely different roles will make sense.

2. Attracting the candidate once they’ve found your company. 

They need to be able to see that the grass really is greener on your side of the hill! You need to have a career site as this is ultimately where the research into your company will start.

You need to understand what values they’ll likely be looking for, or the benefits they’ll be looking for. Of course, this will vary from person to person: geographically, age-wise, seniority-wise, etc. It’s safe to assume that a person looking at a typical role will want to know:

  • Who their coworkers will be
  • What their benefits will be
  • What their salary or compensation will be
  • If it will be remote-first
  • What the culture is like
  • What the vision is like

Some of these will really be the difference between a candidate being willing to leave their current role and not. Any of the outreach activities that you do will end up at the careers site, so you can see this as your runway where candidates land to learn more.

3. Converting the candidate. 

Once you’ve reached these candidates, wherever they are, and once they’ve found your company, you need to make sure it’s easy for them to take that final step in actually building a relationship with you.

It could be as simple as having your contact information clearly accessible. It could be making it easy for them to apply through social networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Make sure you’re considering how easy it is to apply through mobile as well as desktop.

It’s exactly the same approach that you’d take in Marketing. You want to make sure it’s as easy as possible for your leads to convert, and candidates are no different.

What we do at Teamtailor is to support all three of the above points to consider:

  • Reaching candidates through multiple channels
  • Attracting candidates by creating a bespoke career site for you
  • Converting candidates by ensuring you’re easily able to convert them.’

Career sites in times gone by were used by more corporate enterprises, and the startup or SME market (that many in the Sales for Startups community fit into) couldn’t access the types of benefits that a platform like Teamtailor easily allows.

Next up we’ll be discussing how you go about Selecting talent efficiently to ensure that you’re able to pick the best candidate to fill your role. Keep an eye out for our next installment with Fredrik from Teamtailor or, if you’re keen to jump ahead, you can access the full recording of our chat here.

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