One of the successful cases of the HireForYou.Pro team was hiring a Sales Manager in the EU for a CRM and ERP systems development company. We're happy to share this case in details with you. It is really interesting to read :)

Diagnostics.

The company has deep domain expertise in building CRM and ERP systems for small and medium businesses. The company's management has outlined an additional direction for business scaling - outstaffing and sale of expertise for the implementation of long-term and large projects. At the time of diagnosis, only the owner of the business was engaged in sales and development of the client network, account managers were involved in the upsell. The owner intended to eventually fully delegate tasks to the experienced Sales Manager they were looking for.

The company had a negative experience of hiring a Sales Manager using its HR. The hired candidate was not able to bring the result in the form of the set KPI and did not pass the trial period. Plus, the vacancy was closed for about 2 months, and the business owner conducted about 15 interviews with candidates.

During the briefing, we found out that the requirements for the candidate do not correlate with the strategic focus of the company and with the current reality. We suggested adjusting the requirements, validating them, and starting the search.

Hiring strategy.

Candidate profile:

Solid experience in selling short- and long-distance projects in the domain of CRM and ERP systems in the markets of the CIS region, Europe and the USA. The hired specialist had to be in the EU and speak Russian and English (a relocant in the EU from Belarus or Ukraine).

Soft skills: exceptional communication skills and successful negotiation experience, collaboration, commitment, perseverance, result and client orientation, flexibility, multitasking, problem solving, broad outlook, high level of energy, empathy and a great sense of humor :).

Locations: Poland (Lithuania as plan B). Working contract: B2B. Work format: remote.

The vacancy closed in three stages:

1. Prescreen interview with an agency recruiter. To check skills for a prescreen interview, we developed a questionnaire and agreed it with the customer;

2. Interview with the owner of the company (customer);

3. Collection of references from past colleagues of the candidate (with his permission and the list of contacts provided by him).

Search map.

Platforms for posting vacancies: LinkedIn, Telegram and Fb groups of Sales communities and relocators. The main locations are Poland and Lithuania (plan B). We expected a large response from warm candidates among relocators, but did not rule out a cold attraction. For cold recruitment, we identified donor companies (the customer did not provide a list of them) and contacted applicants from there.

Analytics and results.

Closing time for a vacancy is 3 weeks: from drafting a vacancy brief to a specialist entering a job.

Sourcing took 3 days.

We considered 92 applicants:

• We attracted 40 applicants by cold search.
• 52 warm search applicants:
• 34 via a job posting on LinkedIn;
• 6 applicants came through FB-communities;
• 12 applicants came through posting in Telegram communities.

We contacted all candidates and selected 7 profiles relevant to the requirements of the vacancy, location and salary request.

After prescreen interviews (which we conducted for 4 days), 5 candidates fell off the requirements for English and soft-skills.

The two final candidates were invited for an interview with the customer.

To one of them (our favorite and we kept our fingers crossed for him) he made a JobOffer. By the way, the hired specialist came to us through a cold search.

As a result, our customer spent 6 hours: 1 hour to prepare a brief and agree on a vacancy and 2 hours to conduct an interview, and about 30 minutes to: discussion of candidates after the interview, for approval of the job offer; for consideration of relevant profiles; for consideration of references and conclusion of a contract. The specialist started work in 1.5 weeks. Cost of closing a vacancy: 2222 USD.

The time spent by HireForYou.Pro specialists is 41 hours and this time includes: preparation of contract, customer briefing, preparation and coordination of vacancies, attraction of applicants, selection of candidates, accompaniment to interviews, collection of references, feedback, compilation of a job offer and communication on it.

Conclusion.

Now the market trend is that we receive a large response to vacancies, so we need to focus on careful selection according to requirements in order to wisely spend our own time and the time of the customer. A large number of responses (the dream of every recruiter who is used to working in the candidate market) does not optimize the work of recruitment, but rather the opposite - it is a workload that requires high hiring expertise to produce quality results.

Before we take a vacancy and start hiring, it is very important for us to conduct high-quality diagnostics. Such diagnostics reveals "bottlenecks" or inconsistencies in the formation of business needs and a request for an employee who should close these needs. Quite often, such inconsistencies are quite predictable, so when starting analytics, we also use best practice. It is worth discussing openly with the customer his successes and failures, because recruiting is a service for his business.

It is very important to conduct job analytics. Conversion and specific numbers show us the quality of work. And the Data Driven approach and process automation help us a lot in this :).