The Best Sales Recruiters Know How To Answer These 5 Questions

Ensuring you are working with the best sales recruiters in market will ensure you are also building the best sales team you can in market. Why? Because using average or less experienced sales recruiters will inevitably impact the quality of passive talent they are able to credibly engage, convert and present to you.

Here are five critical questions that the best sales recruiters can answer confidently.

Top Questions The Best Sales Recruiters Should Nail

Question 1 : Besides the resume, how do you assess a candidate’s sales skills and capability?

The best sales recruiters will have a thorough candidate assessment process, such as checking performance metrics, evaluating culture fit and asking good behavioural based questions.

However, the big thing that sets top sales recruiters apart, is the ability to genuinely assess a candidate’s sales capability. This requires a good understanding of a range of sales methodologies (such as Challenger, MEDDPICC, Sandler, Value Based Selling, SPIN etc).

When the sales professional being interviewed provides examples of how they have won/lost deals and navigated various sales contexts, the sales recruiter should be able to identify how these methodologies are being utilised. A sales recruiter will need 5+ years of experience to effectively do this and be well trained in professional selling themselves.

This will enable them to evaluate the level of skill, talent, discipline, and innovation a candidate demonstrates in their overall sales execution.

Question 2: What strategies do you use to attract top talent?

The number 1 channel for the best sales recruiters should be their network. With more than 5 years in the market, they should have deep networks of talent. If you are in the same location and industry as them, you should even know many of the same people. A quick check on LinkedIn will even tell you how many connections you have in common for a rough assessment of this. A recruiter who cites their agency’s vast database or advertising channels as a source of talent is a red flag – all recruiters are working from the same global database (LinkedIn) and it ultimately comes down to the quality of relationships that person holds and how well they can convert those relationships into shortlisted profiles.

Question 3: How would you sell my role/company to potential talent? What objections would they likely have?

This is a valuable and highly underutilised question companies can use to figure out the capability of the sales recruiter they are using. If the recruiter you’re interviewing is truly one of the best in the industry, they should be able to shape a quick value prop and narrative based on the information they’ve picked up from your conversations so far as well as understanding of the space.

The value prop should be shaped around key commercial points relevant to the candidate persona with a firm understanding of that persona’s demographic and typical career aspirations. Additionally, they should demonstrate an understanding of the typical frustrations that persona faces (relevant to career trajectory, industry segment, competitive landscape etc).

The best sales recruiters will immediately know the typical objections candidates will have around the value proposition and how compelling that proposition is against other competing companies.

How the sales recruiter handles this will give you a gauge of their effectiveness in the market they operate in as well as their individual sales capability. After all, a big part of your recruiters job is selling – their talent conversion ratio will have a big impact on your shortlist quality.

Their sales style should feel consultative, conversational but shaped around sharp commercial points and questions. If your recruiter is ‘pitchy’ and focused on talking rather than consulting and asking questions, your candidates are unlikely to have strong buy in.

Question 4: How many placements similar to this have you made across the past 6 months?

Really, the more relevant question is: what are your billings over the past 6 months? But given that many stakeholders will be a bit uncomfortable asking this, this is the next best question 😃.

You want to be working with someone who is a high biller within the agency they work at. Top billers are typically the hardest working, most skilled and most entrenched in their niche space. They should be easily able to rattle off a raft off similar placements they have made across the industry referencing brands and names.

If this isn’t a confident and plentiful list, it may be the recruiter is only dabbling in your space, has shallow experience or doesn’t have a great track record in placing candidates.

Question 5: How do you demonstrate transparency in your search process to us as the client?

A key fact is that the higher the utilisation (time) a role takes to fill, the lower the margin on the placement that recruiter makes.

Now this doesn’t mean that the objective of the recruiter is to do a placement with the least amount of time and effort. The opposite is true of the best recruiters. The objective of the best recruiters is to demonstrate to their clients they have found them the ‘best in the market’ rather than the ‘easiest in market’.

This is what keeps their customers sticky and their referrals flowing. So how might a recruiter demonstrate this? Here is a range of tools recruiters might use to demonstrate transparency and commitment to this objective:

• A Google Sheet showing the passive talent approached, feedback and insights about the opportunity
• Weekly committed deliverables for shortlisted candidates
• Commitment to a weekly WIP call with client to discuss progress and workshop candidate objections
• Ranking of candidates against 4 key criteria which, if met, makes the candidate lowest risk to ramp in the role
• Provide balanced feedback on a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses for a role with guidance on where to probe more, rather than a pitch on why you should hire them.

Is Salient one of the best sales recruiters in APAC?

Probably only you can make a judgement on that…🤔 But we hope we’ve given you a few tools to help you make the right call on who to partner with for your most critical sales hires.

Need help in hiring sales talent?

We offer over 15 years of recruiting experience across sales, tech and SaaS. We focus on APAC, SEA, and Japan, and are proud of helping clients reach their revenue and growth goals.

Drop us a note and we’ll be happy to assist you.