Sales Recruitment And Selection Practices - The Importance

A. Sales Recruitment and Selection: The Importance

Recruitment and selection process held an important role for building a strong sales force performance. This process requires the company to invest through human capital as an important resource. The objective of this process is searching for qualified candidates to fulfil the right positions and hopes that they can make long-run returns for the company. Even though there is no right or wrong way how the company chooses the right candidates for certain positions, every single step in recruiting and selecting candidates should be taken carefully in order to get the right person in the right position.

There are few problems associated with inadequate implementation of recruitment and selection process such as :

1. Inadequate sales coverage and lack of customer follow-up

2. Increased training costs to overcome deficiencies

3. More supervisory problems

4. Higher turnover rates

5. Difficulty in establishing enduring relationships with customers

6. Suboptimal total sales force performance

The company that acknowledge these problems, tries to minimise it and set their own approach, therefore the process of recruiting and selecting people would differ from one to another company. It depends on type of industry, the size of the company, company’s activities, and the needs of the company such as the goals of the company which will be achieved in a certain period of time, short term or long term profits and the sustainable growth of the company.

In its process, clear defined of job qualifications and job descriptions will help the company to acquire the right person in the right position. This will make the recruiter’s job easier to find the most suitable person for the company because it limits and narrow down the number of applicant based on certain requirement of the company.

B. Sales Recruitment and Selection: The Process

The goal of recruiting is to find and attract the best pool of qualified applicants to be considered for sales positions . There are three steps in recruitment and selection process, which are planning activities, recruitment process, and selection process .

1. Planning Activities

The planning activities is concerning about current and future staffing needs in order to find the best recruit and align with the company needs. Proper planning will deliver benefit to the company because it helps the company to prevent the kind of poor decisions.

There are several key tasks in planning for recruitment and selections, which are job analysis, job qualifications, job description, recruitment and selection objectives, and recruitment and selection strategy. Description below will deliver brief explanation on each task:

a. Job analysis need to carry out, confirmed and updated which entails an investigation of the tasks, duties, and responsibilities for the job.

b. Job qualifications refer to the aptitude, skills, knowledge, personal traits, and willingness to accept occupational conditions necessary to perform the job. Diversity in sales job requires different job qualification.

c. Job Description is a written summary of the job based on the job analysis and job qualifications, such as job title, duties, tasks, and responsibilities of salesperson, administrative relationships, types of products to be sold, customer types and significant job-related demands, such as mental stress, physical strength or stamina requirements, or environmental pressures to be encountered. In general it used to clarify duties to reduce ambiguity in the sales force.

d. Recruitment and Selection Objectives need to put in place specifically to determine current and future needs of salespeople, to meet the legal and social responsibilities, narrow the applicants which match with the company needs, efficient and effective for recruitment and selection cost, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the previous techniques.

e. Recruitment and Selection Strategy develops at the end of planning activities to formulate and to choose the scope and timing of the recruitment and selection activities, such as when and how it should be done.

In addition, selection systems must be designed in such way to make it compatible with the organisation's structure and operations. In a hierarchical organisation the design process will used top-down approach and be highly procedurals, whereas in a flat organisation the design process may proceed more informally. Thus, those approaches will have to match with the organisation's culture, compatible with HRM systems, acceptable to each line of staff, employees, customers, etc. The size and scope of the system also important, that it will have to match available resources, in terms of staff, time and budgets. To address all the issues in selection design process, the involvement of the stakeholders is a must.

2. Recruitment Process

Following the planning process, there are two sources that can be used for recruitment purposes as follows:

a. Internal Sources

Internal sources come from internal company that conducts the recruitment. Recruitment using these sources is relatively quick and inexpensive. Company does not need any advertisement, head hunter or any other form of recruitment that is costly.

Temasek Holding Singapore as a part of government own corporation shift to internal recruitment and selection process. Recruitment channels now focus on internal talent pools within Government Links Corporation and the wider civil service. Individuals selected for senior and executive management positions generally have the certain characteristics which only had by internal member of the organization. This certain characteristics mean that employees selected for boards and senior and executive management positions possess a set of knowledge, skills, and abilities considered essential for directing international operations. These knowledge, skills, and abilities are closely linked with their in-house training programs and it is less cost to the company.

From the other point of view, Gordon Croy, group supply chain director at National Transcommunications Limited, UK, believes that recruitment should be kept in-house for reasons of: inability of outside recruiters to portray the culture and values of the company.

b. External