How to hire top salespeople in 2024

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Today we're going to talk about how you can hire top salespeople into your team in the next 90 days,

We're going to cover how to take an outbound approach to target and screen interested candidates who are exactly what you're looking for.

What this means for you, is you're going to make great hires without holding your calendar hostage.

Now, the outline of today, I'm going to talk about who I am and what do I know about hiring people.

We'll talk about why job ads don't work and why I don't think you should use them, the hiring process that I use, the tools that I use every day, and the tools that I would use if I were you going to talk about how to qualify candidates, and I'm going to talk about why recruiting agencies so often disappoint.

I am an agency recruiter, I run my own agency, Next Venture. But the way I've thought about this video is as if I were a SAAS founder, and I wanted to hire my first salesperson, but I didn't want to use a recruiter, how would I do this. The mindset here is, you don't need an external recruiter to do this.

To give a bit of a background on myself, my name is Sam Marelich. I've been in sales recruiting since 2016. I've only recruited for venture backed b2b SaaS companies over the last seven and a half years. And I've made more than 120 different placements at over 35 different companies. I started my career in San Francisco. I currently live in New York.

When you are building a SaaS company, you are going to hire people and you need to hire a lot more than you think. An effective hiring process is a really competitive advantage. You didn't start a SaaS company to play small and you don't raise venture capital unless you're looking for an outsized return. The downside of venture capital was when you raise it, you're taking on rocket fuel, you need results, and you need them fairly quickly. But you also need to keep your hiring bar high. And you are being pulled in 1000 directions every single day.

So let's talk about why job ads don't work very well.

This job ad is from August 2023. It was up for about four days. And as you can see here, 802 applicants in 2024. I'm recording this in late March 2024. This problem is even worse, right. But there are a few reasons that there's a really big problem here. The first one is the best people often aren't looking. Second thing the people who you want to hire, if they are looking, they are looking through their network they are not applying. And then the third one is if you take 30 seconds per applicant, you are going to spend seven hours looking at profiles. And that is before that is before you found screen a single one, right, you probably need to find screen 40 People that is another 20 hours on the phone speaking with candidates just to get them to that second stage of the interview process.

Now sourcing candidates is an art and a science, I have found on average with some experience and a good list of target companies to go after, it can take me about five minutes to find a good candidate. If you sit down and spend an hour, you might be able to find 12 or so high quality relevant candidates. Now, if you're doing this for the first time, you're probably not going to be as fast as me. However, if you're a founder, you also likely see a higher response rate than me. So as long as you can find one good person per 20 to 30 minutes, it's actually probably worth your time. Because you know, your response rate is probably going to be about 50%.

You spend two hours, you should be able to generate two good candidates worth speaking to. Right. So think about this, what's going to have a higher ROI. Looking through 800 people who clicked easy apply that click easy apply 100 times a day and then reaching out to the top 5% or finding 84 high quality candidates knowing that even a poor performing message will have a positive outcome. It's the same amount of time.

This is a data point that I want to share from the CEO of Mercury. But their recruiting stats from 2021 are that for every 330 applicants that they got, they hired one person. He recently posted a tweet with 2024 stats, those numbers are now down to about one person hired through applications for every 1200 applicants right so it's even worse than this 802 applicants. So the question has to be asked if job ads don't work, why was I running them?

There is only one role in recruiting for sales where running job ads makes a lot of sense. That's at the SDR level. It's the only role I've come across in the go to market space where you actively want people to apply, I will never run job ads for Account Executives, VPs of sales, sales leaders, anything like that. But I will also never do outbound focused recruiting for SDRs.