Finding The Best Sales Recruiters

Job searches are many things. Among them, they are tedious, frustrating, complicated, and lengthy. This applies not only to job seekers but recruiters as well. According to the job review website Glassdoor, each corporate job attracts an average of 250 applicants for one opening.

That’s a lot of resumes to go through.

If you’re a business looking for qualified tech sales personnel, it behooves you to find that perfect recruit in as little time as possible so they can begin earning. But, simultaneously, you want to feel confident you’re hiring the best person for the position. We are in the sales recruiting business and know the best of the best.

Here is our list of the 10 Best Sales Recruiters in the US.

The Best Sales Recruiters in the US

1) Rainmakers

The leading tech recruiting platform hiring tech and SaaS salespeople.  Rainmakers brings data into sales hiring and utilizes the latest sourcing technology to help companies build their sales teams efficiently. Hire qualified and diverse salespeople through a quick and scalable platform. They offer both self-service and managed solutions. Operates US-wide.

Learn more: rainmakers.co

2) Hirewell

Hirewell is a Chicago-based talent solutions provider.  They have over 200 recruiters globally, focusing on sales (15+ sales recruiters).  They work with hundreds of companies across the US, ranging from early-stage tech companies to enterprise tech organizations. Hirewell helps companies hire one-off sales executives and build out teams of SDRs, AEs, and GTM teams. Hirewell also partners with companies for their sales hiring efforts through its OnDemand Recruiting offering, where it embeds a Hirewell recruiter into its recruiting function.

Learn more: hirewell.com

3) The Collective Search 

Boutique agency specializing in sales hires for venture-backed SaaS/tech companies. They are known for their incredibly personal, meticulous, caring approach to each placement, emphasizing personality/culture fit. Strong, loyal community of sales professionals who care about thriving and succeeding. Started in SF and now have a presence on both coasts.

4) True Search

A diversified recruiting agency with a focus on working with venture-backed tech companies. They have a broad focus across many disciplines, including sales, technology, and finance. 

5) Betts Recruiting

Betts recruiting focuses on sales, marketing, and executive hires for Venture Backed startups and technology companies

6) CloserIQ

The firm is HQ’d in New York and has a strong presence with East Coast employers. They specialize in Sales, Technology, and Executive Search.

7) HuntClub

An executive search firm with a strong focus on Go-To-Market leadership

8) RJR Partners

A traditional executive search and recruiting firm with experience in sales, marketing, and product, among others. 

What Is a Tech Sales Recruiter?

A sales recruiter is a specialist who works with businesses to find the best candidates for sales positions of all levels, from Sales Development Representatives (SDR) and Account Executives (AE) to Sales Managers and VPs of Sales. To match job seekers with the appropriate opportunities, they work with applicants to determine their skills, experience, and goals.

Tech sales recruiters specifically aim to help salespeople with experience or interest in technically-oriented businesses—whether they be focused on hardware, software, cybersecurity, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, telecom, or more—find the best opportunities by introducing them to jobs and organizations they may not have been aware of.

They accomplish this by leveraging excellent communication and networking skills, industry knowledge, and the ability to match job seekers with hiring managers.

How To Find a Recruiter for Your Business

Finding a sales recruiter isn’t as difficult as one might imagine. Here are the key points to keep in mind.

Industry-Specific or General?

If you’re looking for a sales position that doesn’t require much-specialized knowledge, you can go with a recruiter that works with all sorts of applicants. This can be advantageous because it gives you a larger pool of potential applicants. The downside is that you may get more misses than hits if your company focuses on specialized knowledge, such as tech.

If you choose a recruiter, such as Rainmakers, specializing in tech-related positions, you’re more likely to get promising candidates right from the start.

Long Term or Short Term?

Generally, there are two types of recruiters—staffing agencies and permanent placement recruiters.

Staffing agencies hire for temporary or temp-to-perm hourly positions and then contract them to employers, collecting a percentage of the hourly fee as a markup.

Permanent placement recruiters focus on long-term hiring opportunities. The recruitment agency finds, evaluates, and represents talent, while the hiring manager hires the prospect as a full-time employee.

Researching Recruiters Online

You can find many professional sales recruiters in various areas. Two top places to start would be Google and, perhaps better, LinkedIn. Start with some keyword searches that apply to your business or the specific sales position you intend to fill. Some examples might include:

• “Sales recruitment”
• “Talent acquisition”
• “Headhunter sales tech”
• “Sales executive recruitment”
• “SDR hiring”
• “Account Executive/AE tech hiring”

Word of Mouth

One of the best and most reliable ways to find a trustworthy recruiter is to contact your professional network. If the hiring manager of a business in the same industry as yours reports success using a particular recruitment platform, it’s a good bet you may as well.

The Top Recruitment Markets

You’ll want a recruitment agency with knowledge and access to candidates in the top tech sales markets in the country. Ensure your recruiter knows where to find potential salespeople in major U.S. cities like San Francisco, Austin, Chicago, New York City, Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Raleigh.

What Are the Best Recruiting Tips For Tech Companies?

Hiring the best tech salespeople is not easy. However, top performers are in high demand, and working in the tech industry can be particularly challenging. Here are some tips that should better your chances of locating and hiring the right people for your business.

Clearly Define the Position

Be straightforward about the qualities you’re looking for in a sales professional before you start recruiting them. Similarly, have clear job descriptions available either as part of a hiring pitch or easily located online.

Lay out the knowledge, abilities, and other attributes required for the hire to succeed. When these are in place, it will be simpler to evaluate each candidate.

Use a Personal Approach

When reaching out to a potential hire, address them by name and avoid any appearance of their name being inserted into a form. While talking about compensation is important, don’t forget to speak about company culture and the unique benefits of working for your company.

Many leave their positions due to poor compensation and a hostile company atmosphere. Put the candidate’s worry to rest by selling them the benefits of hiring with you.

Don’t Make Them Wait

It’s become almost a bad joke—the amount of time and number of hoops candidates have to jump through to go from initial interview to final hire.

That won’t work for tech sales positions that are in high demand. You want to streamline the process or, at least, ensure the candidate knows where they are in the hiring process and the expected timeline. Tech sales candidates are likely considering several offers. You don’t want to draw the process out so long that you lose a potentially great new hire to another company because you didn’t move fast enough.

An experienced recruiting agency like Rainmakers can help make the hiring process quicker, so this is less likely.

Make the Right Offer

Many tech salespeople start with a basic salary between $40,000 and $92,000, with incentives and commissions ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars, with many earning over $100,000 annually. If you can’t give competitive pay, your candidate will go elsewhere.

Also, consider additional incentives or benefits during the offer stage to help close the deal. You may even want to consider a sign-on bonus.

Should I Connect With Recruiters On LinkedIn?

The short answer? Absolutely.

There are several reasons why looking for recruiters on LinkedIn is a good idea.

LinkedIn is the largest platform for professionals of all types worldwide. As a result, it’s often the first place companies list open positions and where hiring managers begin looking for potential candidates. Likewise, it’s where many sales professionals post their availability or interest in looking for a sales position.

Because LinkedIn is so large, it can be daunting to look for candidates individually, no matter how narrow you make your keyword searches. By looking for a professional recruiting agency on LinkedIn, you can find the right agency for your business to help you in your search.

Sales Recruitment Solutions At Rainmakers

Rainmakers accepts only quality applicants, so you can be confident that you’re interviewing the top sales talent around. In addition, when we look at potential candidates, you can see all their sales stats, such as performance, what they’ve sold, and who they’ve sold to. This allows you to save valuable time by quickly identifying candidates with the skills, experience, and fit you’re looking for.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help fill your tech sales needs.

Salespeople get a negative reputation for “only caring about money.”  I am sure that most of you have heard this and many probably believe it.  In fact, this doesn’t seem like a controversial statement at all.

Let’s look at the data and see if this is true

As a reminder, Rainmakers is the leading software and community for hiring SaaS sales professionals like Account Executives and Sales Development Reps.  We have collected data from thousands of candidates working across thousands of companies in tech.

Entry-level Account Executives and Sales Development Reps

When we look at salespeople earlier in their sales career, like SDR’s and Junior AE’s, we do see a demand for higher salaries.  On average salespeople with a base salary from $40k-$70k are looking for a pay increase of ~$15K in their next role.  While this may seem like a lot, these are generally people that are earlier in their career and hungrier. They likely don’t have a lot of savings and are looking to level up in their careers.  Many of these folks are looking to be promoted from an SDR to an AE, which also naturally comes with a pay increase.  On the hiring side, this is why it can be challenging to hire “experienced SDR’s” with only a small increase in comp.  These salespeople are looking to take their career to the next level. (Side note- if you do need to hire experienced SDR’s, message me as Rainmakers has helped a lot of companies here).

Mid-level reps

Looking at salespeople in the $70k-$80k base range, they are looking for an ~$8k pay bump.  These are still reps earlier in their career and they are looking to continue to move up.

However, once we get beyond that comp level, things start to change.  When we look at reps with a $80k-$140k base, these reps are only looking for on average a ~$3k bump.  This is pretty insignificant at these levels – only a 3% or less increase in base. 

Enterprise salespeople

And let’s take a look at reps at the next level.  Reps making +$140k are actually open to DECREASES in base and this decrease increases as their base increases.  So these are the top, highest paid reps and they “don’t care about money?”

When we actually look into the data, we will see that salespeople don’t only care about money.  When salespeople are younger and earlier in their career, building their life, learning, of course they want to get promoted and earn more.  And the ones that continue to progress deserve that too, as they are generating significant value for their companies.  *Remember that salespeople are what is driving the majority of revenue at most SaaS companies.* Most people in all industries, earlier in their career would be looking to make more money. This is not something unique to salespeople.

But once salespeople get to a mid-level and higher, money becomes significantly less important.  These people may be looking for a small bump, of course people like to feel wanted and appreciated.  But really other factors are more important than just the cash.  Experienced salespeople are not looking to change jobs just to make $3k more. 

Once salespeople are at the higher levels of comp, salespeople are legitimately open to make less money.   Why would they want to switch jobs and make the same or less money?  

Changing the narrative

Let’s change the narrative and start spreading the truth about salespeople. Salespeople aren’t just hired guns that only care about money. Salespeople care about product, culture, team, growth, and much more.  They want to find where they and their skills fit best and where they can contribute strongly to their teams and companies.

———-This is a repost from my Sales Hiring article that was published in the Acceleprise blog————-

Now more than ever, business organizations need buyer-focused sales professionals who possess the character and the competencies to deliver high value to both the customers they serve and the companies they work for.

In a highly competitive talent market, the process of finding, hiring, and keeping these high-performing sellers can be quite challenging.

Sure, technology can help heat up your metrics, but it will only go so far. Talent is the only thing that can sell your brand at the end of the day and will determine the difference between sales organizations that are well-positioned to win the future and those that struggle just to survive the challenges of the present.

As customer centricity, account-based selling, and artificial intelligence redraw the contours of business, talent will become more crucial to keeping pipelines full, flowing, and fruitful. If your organization lacks the will to attract, recruit, and retain excellent sales professionals, then you are just exerting futile efforts at postponing failure to a later date.

After all, only sales professionals with the right skills and mindset can drive meaningful conversations with prospects and orchestrate the outcomes customers expect. Today’s consumers — especially in the B2B space — are empowered buyers looking for trustworthy consultants who can help them achieve success. They are not keen on taking cold calls from desperate sellers who primarily engage people just to make a sale and meet quotas.

Why is it so hard to find good sales reps?

Forward-looking enterprises often implement aggressive recruitment and retention strategies for top sales talent. These enterprises already deploy many excellent professionals on their sales floor. Given the emerging business realities, these highly competitive companies simply couldn’t afford not to.

For one thing, businesses improve profitability by as much as 30% when they hire top-notch candidates, according to a Gallup poll. In the B2B space, moreover, corporate clients have nearly unlimited access to information about alternative products, and virtually nothing prevents them from brand-hopping at will. If your sellers lack the skills at building effective solutions and at keeping these solutions relevant throughout the customer lifecycle, then closing deals and reducing customer churn will both be very difficult. Which, as you well know, leads to diluted revenue, profit margins, and morale.

Hiring anyone just to fill the vacuum wouldn’t do, either. In fact, poor hires cost a lot more in direct and collateral damage than not hiring in the first place. A bad hire causes your team to lose a substantial amount of time, money, and energy, with some estimates placing financial loss at hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per year just for one bad hiring decision.

Meanwhile, the challenges of selling as a field also cause most people to shun sales as a career option, even compelling a significant number of practitioners to shift their line of work. Either effect further trims the number of competent sales professionals in the market.

Best channels to find good sales reps

If your organization plans to recruit the best sellers, there are a few places you would want to check out.

Start with your personal network

Your social and professional network covers your family and friends as well as acquaintances from grade school, the fitness club, and the workplace. Your network will likely include a number of competent sales practitioners, professionals who enjoy working with people, or individuals who are good at articulating value and convincing others to view things from a particular perspective. You can reach out to these people and probe whether some are open to working in a sales organization with you.

• Pros: Reconnecting with people you already know could be fun and won’t take as much effort.
• Cons: The process of identifying competent sales professionals or individuals with high potential in sales would be informal at best and largely dependent on your hunch/intuition. Overpromising on the benefits may also cause a strain in otherwise friendly relationships.
• Tips: Don’t overlook your alumni association from high school and college, as well as the business associations and social clubs you’ve joined in the past. Also consider sales professionals who have reached out to you regarding business matters. If they’ve managed to make you sign a subscription, perhaps they’ll be good at selling your product as well.

Ask for referrals and recommendations

If gleaning potential sales superstars from your network doesn’t work as planned, you can always request for referrals. Just like you, your friend or acquaintance knows somebody who works as a high-flying real estate agent or someone who has an uncanny ability at persuading people. Unless you have other options with higher odds of success, referred candidates would be worth checking out.

• Pros:  Building new relationships is easier when you have common reference points: in these case, your mutual contact and your shared interest in selling.
• Cons: The competency or potential of the recommended individual depends on how the referrer defines what a “good seller” is.
• Tips: Remember to request for updated contact information and as much detail about the person as possible. Also, getting referrals from acquaintances who work as recruiters or sales leaders would be doubly valuable since you can assume these recommendations have been vetted more professionally.

Optimize events and meetups

Industry events such as seminars, trade shows, workshops, and conferences are premium opportunities for relationship building. They’re also great for sniffing out and assessing potential hires.

• Pros: Social events that relate to your industry help narrow the talent pool to those who are highly relevant to your business.
• Cons: Most attendees would already be connected to other companies and brands. However, the vast majority of them are also likely to be looking for better career opportunities, according to HubSpot.
• Tips: Tread lightly and be subtle. Limit yourself to building connections if your new prospect does not send positive signals that he or she is looking for a new employer. It’s not good to antagonize other industry players and be tagged as a “talent poacher.” Also, hang-out in places where executives and sellers usually go. There might be opportunities of discovering eager talent once in a while.

Squeeze LinkedIn dry

The planet’s largest professional network is perhaps the best place to build a shortlist of potential sales hires. The site’s powerful search functions can help you find qualified (but often presently employed) sellers in your particular market niche. You can also post job ads and reach thousands of professionals who meet your standards and qualifications.

• Pros: LinkedIn is purposely designed for businesses, professionals, and everything in between. It is a vast marketplace of ideas, products, and talent.
• Cons: Applying to job postings over LinkedIn is so easy your recruitment campaign might be swamped with applications too quickly for you to catch up and effectively select candidates who meet your requirements.
• Tips: Require additional information, a portfolio if appropriate, and a cover letter. These will help you get more pertinent information on top of what’s already available in candidates’ account profiles. Moreover, these will help you gauge whether a particular candidate is really interested in your posting (i.e., less interested candidates will not bother to submit additional requirements). Having said that, be wary also of desperate job hunters who’ll do anything to get an interview.

Explore other social media sites

If you need an entire brigade to fill your sales floor, then you can go beyond LinkedIn to other social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, and Quora. Hundreds of millions of people visit these networks regularly to communicate their message and join conversations that matter to them.

• Pros: It’s free. You can start with your online social network and expand the search from there. There are also communities — especially on Instagram and Facebook — that could be very relevant to your business. Moreover, any sales candidate gleaned from these networks can arguably be considered “social media savvy,” a desired trait for new generations of sellers.
• Cons: There are a lot of noise on social media that will make your search hazy. You can easily get distracted and lose precious time navigating random distractions.
• Tips: You can use market research to target specific demographics you are envisioning for your salesforce. Millennials and younger workers, for example, tend to use Instagram and SnapChat more while highly knowledgeable and opinionated professionals follow conversations on Quora.

Conduct campus recruitment

Leverage the good relationships you’ve built at your alma mater. For open internships at your sales organization, your old campus may just be the hunting ground you need. Go beyond your college to other academic institutions in the area if you need to create a larger talent pool.

• Pros: College students and new grads are generally eager to enter the workplace. They are more flexible and trainable compared to candidates who have been in the job market for a while.
• Cons: It may take tons of training to get young talent truly prepared for the tough world of selling.
• Tips: Look for the right attitude, motivation, and behavior.

Traditional sales recruiters, headhunters, and job sites

Job sites such as Monster, Glassdoor, and Indeed.com provide the online interfaces that connect recruiters with job applicants. Like LinkedIn and specialist career marketplaces, job recruiting sites offer the best success rates for your staffing needs.

• Pros: You get straightforward recruiting services. You also gain insightful job market data such as median salaries for specific positions, industry, and locations.
• Cons: Getting the best results might entail costs. You will also be competing with similar recruiters targeting the same subset of applicants on the site.
• Tips: Streamline and clarify your job posting. Make it stand out from the posts of rival recruiters. Use site features such as Glassdoor’s employer reviews to gather worker sentiment and find professionals who might be “open” to trying out other employers.

Fine-tune your search via career marketplaces

Online career marketplaces such as Rainmakers attract the best employers and the top practitioners in a specific field. When these parties meet, excellence happens.

• Pros: Sales-oriented career marketplaces like Rainmakers already screen candidates for different sales roles and allow only highly competent practitioners to join its marketplace. Talent profiles are generally more in-depth than their accounts on LinkedIn, saving recruiters precious research time when hiring salespeople.
• Cons: Top-notch services usually come with a price tag.
• Tips: Use special features such as Rainmakers’ sales performance history to better assess a candidate’s credentials.

Online vs Offline?

Staffing your sales organization can take the offline or online route, or both. Depending on the situation, you can get the best of online and offline recruitment to benefit the final makeup of your sales team. So, make the best of in-person meet-ups during events and conferences. But don’t forget to put your best foot forward when hunting for talent online.

Some final tips and tactics

Sales recruitment is not only a challenging task, but one whose impact can create a powerful chain reaction far down the road. If you’ve hired the right people, then expect positive outcomes to pop up here and there. But if you enable bad candidates to come on board, the damage in terms of time, money, and morale can be devastating. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once claimed that bad hires cost the company $100 million.

So take sales recruitment seriously. Hire specifically for the task you need done but never discount character and motivation. Technical skills should always go hand-on-hand with attitude. For experienced roles, consider the candidate’s professional selling history, relevant training, and certifications.

Don’t settle for less. Do your homework as a diligent recruiter and the rest will follow. Remember, nothing else can move your business further than highly motivated talent.