Anyone who has dealt with recruitment knows that the recruitment demand always comes from someone – it could be a business partner of the company, a project manager or a new client hoping for potential cooperation. Behind that person there is Sales Manager, who builds relationships with new clients and maintains them with the current ones. Even in case of in-house recruitment, the cooperation of the Recruitment team with Sales is important in determining the current needs of the organization so that the vision is always consistent and well thought out. So how do we effectively build Recruitment & Sales Team collaboration?
Two perspectives
Let’s now lean on two perspectives starting with the role of the Sales Manager. He is the one who builds the company’s sales strategy and maintains relationships with key customers. By maximizing sales, he grows the business and thus seeks new sales channels to meet targets.
From the perspective of a Sales Manager, the most important thing is to thoroughly understand the client’s needs for a given project, to clearly specify its requirements for the candidate sought – defining both soft competencies, such as communication, teamwork or leadership skills and team management, ability to act in crisis situations, etc., and hard competencies: seniority level (work experience), technological stack, knowledge of relevant frameworks, languages – here both programming and foreign languages, sometimes necessary for the project. It is worth adding that the set of competencies can vary significantly depending on the required role and the specifics of the projects.
What’s next…?
After obtaining the relevant information on the client’s expectations from the candidate, the key on the line of Sales & Recruitment is to skillfully communicate the nature of the project and the ideal profile of the candidate sought, his/her set of qualities and skills. What follows is that both parties must equally and clearly understand what kind of project they are dealing with and what kind of person would ideally fit its needs.
It is the Recruitment department that is responsible for recruiting and vetting potential candidates, armed with the right knowledge of the project itself and expectations, but also thanks to their experience, they are able to select the ideal candidate who will not only fit competently, but also personality-wise, into the team and the project.
A good idea and synergy of activities is the idea of a final interview with selected candidates jointly with the Recruitment and Sales Manager’s department to jointly decide on the final selection of the future employee. Combining the activities of these two departments with their knowledge and experience will most benefit the client project.
Importantly, the Recruitment department also plays a key role when it comes to feedback on the project budget. It can happen that the client’s expectations of the budget at hand are inadequate and need to be revised – this is where the key role of the Recruitment department and sales cooperation and support emerges.
There are situations in which the set of expected requirements from a potential candidate(s) in terms of his/her experience, length of service, technical skills exceeds the client’s budget for a given project, because the market rates do not match the client’s assumed expectations of possible costs.
“The candidate is too expensive” - daily cases
There are situations when the set of expected requirements from the potential candidate(s) as to his/her experience, work experience, technical skills exceeds the client’s budget provided for the project, because the market rates do not match the assumed expectations of the clients as to the possible costs to be incurred.
Then the role of the Sales Manager is to adequately communicate the existing situation and find an optimal solution, depending, of course, on the project, whether by increasing the budget, proposed division of the project into stages – spreading the budget in time so that it is feasible for the customer, verifying the actual needs and adequately adjusting expectations as to the candidates, if possible proposing alternative people for the project who are optimal in terms of experience and skills and financial expectations.
