LinkedIn Discussion for Sales Managers: What Do You Do When HR Can’t Find the Hunters You Need?

I recently posted this question on LinkedIn:

Sales Managers:  What do you do when your HR group isn’t able to identify the hunters you need?

With the incredible costs due to unfilled positions (customers going with the competition, RFPs not completed and generally missed revenue opportunities), what do you (the revenue manager) do to help HR see the have to use an outside source? I have 2 managers right now with open positions, no real candidates in the pipeline and HR says that they wanna fill the job internally.

I got some really great answers from sales managers, business owners, recruiters, and HR people from around the country, and I thought the gist of the discussion was worth posting here for you.

The general consensus seems to be that HR departments are difficult to work with on a candidate search because (1) there are often corporate politics coming into play, (TWO) HR doesn’t have the expertise to handle finding specialized sales professionals, and (3) HR doesn’t understand the true cost of a vacant career opportunity (and might not be all that interested).   Especially if HR is working with a limited budget, they’re not going to be interested in using an outside recruiting source–because they don’t grasp the true cost of a vacant career opportunity to the company as a whole.  So, they should stick to the onboarding portion of bringing in a new candidate.

More than a few say that sales managers should just bypass HR entirely–because revenue and marketing departments are much more equipped to recruit than HR departments, much more versed in what it is that they need in a new sales rep, and should already have an extensive network of sales reps to mine for their needs.  (In some cases, these were also their arguments for not using a third-party recruiter.)  Most importantly, if the revenue manager is going to be held responsible for making the numbers, he or she shouldn’t got to rely on another department to that extent for their team’s success.

My position is, of course, that sales managers make much more productive use of their time by working with the team they have in place to make the sales, and leaving the candidate search to a recruiter.  The more money a manager generates in a normal cycle, the more it costs to use that time finding a new sales rep.  And if recruiting isn’t your business, you’re almost never going to have access to the kind of candidate pool a headhunter has, no matter how extensive your professional network is–which means you’ll be missing out on some very high-caliber talent.  If the sales manager (or the HR department) has to run ads to discover talent, that becomes a costly gamble which can easily bring you no results from your efforts.  A valuable recruiting team saves time and money, while increasing productivity and sales force effectiveness.

What do you think?  Let me know in the comments below.

Article courtesy of  Peggy McKee - Owner / Senior Recruiter at the nationally
recognized clinical and pharma revenue recruiting team of PHC Consulting.
© Copyright 2008 PHC Consulting | All rights reserved

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LinkedIn Discussion for Sales Managers: What Do You Do When HR Can’t Find the Hunters You Need?