To improve the overall quality of your sales candidate pool, shift your focus away from skills and experience and towards performance-based measures. For example, it is probably more important for sales candidates to have extensive and well-developed networks of business contacts than it is for them to have college degrees. Also, consider how you will measure new salespeople’s performance during their first thirty, sixty, ninety, and 180 days. What activities will you expect them to perform? What results do you expect these activities to produce, and in what time frame? (See Inspect Activities, Not Just Results.)
If you include performance-based language in your recruiting ads, you will start attracting fewer poor candidates, as some will de-select themselves. You will also start attracting more strong candidates, as they will no longer be screened out by invalid “knockout factors”.
For more information on performance-based recruiting ads, performance-based interviewing, and other effective recruiting practices, see Lou Adler’s book, Hire With Your Head. (See Appendix C: Suggested Reading.)