Every minute you spend interviewing a sales candidate that ultimately isn’t a good fit for an open seat is wasted time, money, and effort. But ask any HR manager or hiring specialist how much time they spend on just such candidates and they’ll probably clench their teeth.

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So what’s driving that constant misalignment between candidates and open sales positions? One word – screening. Along with sourcing, the screening process is the second half of the critical but often overlooked dynamic duo in the upper half of the hiring funnel. Thankfully, as I’m about to explain, partnering with a sales recruiting company like Pursuit could not only help you hire top sales talent, but eliminate wasted time and effort along the way.

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The Consequences of Poor Candidate Screening

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Candidate screening is a two-way street. While it’s a valuable opportunity to see if an individual is qualified for your open seat, it’s also a great time to discover if you, as an employer, can provide sufficient value to the candidate. Is the compensation adequate? What about your culture and other intangibles involved with the job?

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Answering those questions usually involves taking a deeper dive into a sales candidate’s career objectives, personality, and what they want in a work-life balance. Unfortunately, finding those answers also requires quite a bit of time and effort, two commodities that are in short supply in most companies. That, of course, leads to either a brief or non-existent screening process.

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But what are the consequences of poor candidate screening? The most obvious answer is simply all of that wasted time on interviews you never should have booked in the first place. However, the domino effect of poor screening goes far beyond an interviewer’s wasted time.

• Opportunity cost: Companies that bring department managers and leadership into the interview process have the most to lose, investing resources that could go to strategizing, coaching sales teams, and growing the company.
• Making the wrong hire: Poor screening significantly increases the odds of making a poor hire, also increasing the likelihood of having to fill that same position not far into the future.
• Loss of agility: A tight labor market magnifies the importance of reacting quickly when the right candidate pops up, something that’s tough to achieve when interviewing scores of ill-fitting prospects.
• Wasted money: If a company is paying thousands of dollars a month for an internal team that isn’t sourcing or screening good candidates  – or an external firm that isn’t producing – that’s wasted money with nothing to show in return.
• Lost revenue: Every minute a position remains open is lost revenue from a producing rep that should be sitting in that seat.

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The takeaway from poor screening is this – you’re wasting time and losing money, also probably hiring people that aren’t a good fit. That creates a vicious cycle of recruiting, hiring, and losing or firing talent, only to repeat the process over and over again.

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The Benefits of Partnering With a Specialist

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You probably noticed that time is a common thread by this point. Most companies simply don’t have the time to properly screen prospects. Unfortunately, that also means they’re suffering the consequences of poor screening.

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But HR leadership isn’t alone in the fight for top sales talent. That’s what makes a specialist like Pursuit such a valuable partner, bringing expertise to the screening process that’s extremely difficult for a company to obtain on its own. Otherwise, a hiring manager has to worry about:

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• Misleading resumes: Although numbers and experience can be deceiving on paper, Pursuit asks the right questions to reveal a prospect’s true potential and abilities.
• Selling a candidate: The best sales candidates typically aren’t looking for a job, making Pursuit’s ability to “sell” a position to a prospect a vital part of their decision-making.
• Identifying the “it” factor: Pursuit’s vast experience in sales recruiting and hiring means we can identify the “it” factor in a candidate, the intangible qualities that only top talent brings to the table.

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Properly screening prospects is critical to an efficient and effective hiring process, having a spillover effect across your operations. With stakes that high, it only makes sense to partner with an industry leader in sales recruiting, one that genuinely understands the specific needs of a dynamic sales organization. And that’s exactly what Pursuit adds to the sales recruiting equation.