Ask any sales director what their biggest challenges are and “recruiting and retaining” top talent will always be somewhere in the top three. A great seller is hard to find and if you have one, you know that they are always being aggressively recruited.
I recently spoke about sales culture and strategy on a webinar hosted by Vendasta. The moderator asked us to give a summary of what chapters would be listed in the Table of Contents if we wrote a Digital Sales Playbook. Standard answers always include building pipelines, driving results, consultative selling and compensation structures.
My first chapter is People. I’ll tell you a little secret: It doesn’t matter what playbook I’m writing for which industry, the first chapter is always going to be People. The who is the how. Period.
By now we know that the rate of Baby Boomers leaving the workforce means almost 75% of our employees will be Millennials by 2025. This isn’t going to be Ward Cleaver’s job market where a qualified employee is willing to put in a hard day’s work for a fair wage and that transactional relationship of employer/employee will last for the next three decades. If your talent acquisition strategy doesn’t include connecting people with passion and purpose, you might as well take a number and hope it comes up sometime in the next five years.
Recruiting top talent is about creating an environment of winning, learning and growing. Finding a way to honor unique contributions to the team, offer inspiring professional development opportunities, connect personal passions to the purpose of the work, and build camaraderie is the path to a recruitment strategy that is based on more than just a compensation plan. Pay and benefits matter, but you’re not likely to recruit a unicorn on that alone. And you certainly won’t retain one that way.
I just read the Center for Sales Strategy Talent Magazine and couldn’t articulate any better what Tegna Director of Sales Byron Wilkinson said about a local sales manager on his team who routinely connects her sellers with nonprofit opportunities. He said, “Amy understands that our people crave a mission and a purpose and she helps to satisfy those needs with actionable moments.” Connecting passion and purpose.
You also likely need to revisit how you are recruiting. If you are not recruiting today, yesterday and tomorrow for every position within your company, regardless of whether you have an opening, you’re already way behind. Just as we tell sellers to always have a pipeline of potential advertisers and to always be closing, businesses today must have a deep pipeline of potential employees and always be recruiting. If you start recruiting when someone resigns, you’re likely to have an unfilled position for a long time and you’re also much more likely to settle because you’re desperate.
Recruiting done well is a courtship where the employer and the employee have the time to get to know each other and build a relationship that eventually leads to a decision about whether your values and goals align.
I often have leaders tell me they can’t recruit because they don’t have an open position. Baloney. How many times in your career has someone mentioned a job opportunity to you even though you were gainfully employed and it sounded intriguing? Or how many times have you had a conversation with someone who described a new position for which they just hired someone and you told them to keep you in mind if they ever had another such opportunity?
Tales of Effective Recruiting – Referrals and LinkedIn Rule
Let me tell you a quick story. I was the CEO of the Colorado Press Association in Denver from 2010 to 2014. I loved my job. I loved where I lived. I wasn’t looking for a job. In early 2014, I received a call from the president of Swift Communications about a publisher position they were recruiting to California. After a few meetings, we decided that it wasn’t the right fit for me, but we certainly understood a lot about each other’s priorities, vision and values. As I hung up the phone, I said, “If you ever have a similar opportunity in one of your resort communities … like maybe Aspen, let me know.” I lived in Aspen from 2014 to late 2021 first serving as the publisher of The Aspen Times and later in an expanded role within Swift. I built a relationship with Swift and they with me. I shared my values and goals and they shared theirs. The position I wanted wasn’t available. When it became available, they came back to me and the rest is history. This is effective recruiting.
One of the best talents I ever hired was a project manager for a variety of new initiatives within a media company. Initially, I contracted with her to be a magazine editor for seasonal publications. At the time, she was a highly sought-after freelance magazine writer and had been involved in a variety of other projects. I knew she wasn’t looking for full-time work and she was pretty clear that she enjoyed her flexible schedule and the benefits of working for herself and from home. As we worked together and built a relationship, she asked more and more about the culture of the company, the work that we did and the opportunities for growth. We both realized that she was a perfect fit for a role that I didn’t have. I created the role and hired her full-time.
The best editor I have ever worked with is David Krause. When I began the search for a new editor at The Aspen Times, I did the standard job posting on all of the recruitment sites, put an ad in the paper and then logged onto my favorite recruiting tool — LinkedIn. I needed to see whether I had any incredible editor connections who I had forgotten about and who I knew who would likely know at least one talented editor they could introduce me to. I stumbled across an old industry friend named Larry who I immediately called. I told him that I needed a unicorn in Aspen and was wondering if he knew one. He did. It was David Krause. Larry knew David well enough to know what values were most important to David – family, community, work and a desire to live in the mountains. David also worked for Larry. And while I know that Larry hated to let David leave his newsroom, he referred to me the best possible candidate and to date, he remains the best hire I’ve ever made. Lest you missed it, I didn’t find him on the internet. I found him through my network, which is a powerful recruiting tool.
Perhaps most importantly, if you truly want to hire the best salesperson on the planet, you should be screening for core talent. In the advertising world, we tend to make the mistake of hiring the person who has the most relevant experience on paper. I’ll just say it: If you don’t possess a core list of key sales talents or you lack a really impressive track record, it doesn’t matter how much media (or other) sales experience you have.
If I can hire someone with no experience, but all of the right core talents, I can teach them to sell darn near anything.
As you think about what recruiting looks like for your company into the future, consider the following:
- Whose job is it to recruit?
- How much time do I, or others in the organization, spend recruiting every week?
- How deep is my pipeline if I lost a top talent tomorrow? Can I just pick up the phone and call someone on my list or am I starting from scratch?
- Do I roll out the red carpet for potential candidates? What is the candidate experience with my company in the recruitment phase?
Pro Tip: If you don’t have a recruiting strategy, you need one. Desperation and wishful thinking won’t produce the right results.
Samantha Johnston is the founder and lead strategist at Strategy Hound, LLC. She has recruited some incredible talent and loves helping others to do the same. She was also recruited once by a company that, over the course of more than 10 hours of interviews and conversations, never once asked her a single question about herself. As a result, she knows an awful lot about them. She didn’t accept the position.
