Articulating and Documenting Your Hiring Profile

​example​TalentBin: At TalentBin we targeted new grads out of high-quality universities, like Stanford, Cal, other UC schools, and so on, with a history of achievement in both taking initiative and building things. We also looked for indicators of success in team endeavors and athletic excellence (particularly in those unpleasant grinder sports). Alternatively, we targeted existing market development staff from LinkedIn—an industry bellwether in the recruiting market—with the promise that those market development reps (SDRs) would have a faster path toward becoming account executives at a fast-growing organization like TalentBin, compared to a slower-moving, larger organization like LinkedIn. We also hired former technical recruiters who had high subject-matter expertise but also the high-activity execution characteristics needed to sell software. We specifically did not pull account executives out of LinkedIn, or legacy sales organizations like Monster or CareerBuilder; these more senior staff were typically inured to selling existing solutions that the market is well aware of (job postings, resume search, and LinkedIn Recruiter) and thus were less suited to presenting a new, innovative product that substantially departed from legacy solutions. They were also typically more focused on maintaining and renewing existing contracts than on acquiring new customers, and relying on an established brand for making contact with customers rather than being a tip of the spear and penetrating and proliferating within accounts.

​example​Meraki: A highly successful hardware sales company, Meraki adopted the strategy of pulling high-impact sales staff out of IT value-added reseller (VAR) shops. In those small IT consulting shops, which are largely undifferentiated from each other, sales professionals need to hustle hard in order to beat others out for business. Moreover, because they are dealing with organizations that typically are without IT leadership (CIO, VP of IT), reps are serving in a very consultative role. IT resellers constantly see new technologies come across their shelves, so the ability to understand customer pain and then identify new technologies to solve those problems was paramount for these folks. Lastly, there is a high level of inside-sales execution on the part of these VARs, in order to keep their efficiencies high and cost of sales low in a low-margin business. All of these characteristics aligned with Meraki’s needs and drove sales excellence in the organization.

​example​Yelp and Groupon: Yelp and Groupon would be examples in the other direction. Because of low average contract values, a massive market of hundreds of thousands of small to midsize accounts, and a relatively uncomplicated value proposition, their sales teams are architected for extremely high activity in support of a fairly transactional sales cycle. This means lots of junior go-getters—fresh out of college and willing to make hundreds of calls a day—looping across thousands of accounts. And while having intimacy with the local merchant’s business pains is helpful, because of the fairly straightforward sales being proposed, reps aren’t required to have a high level of selling expertise or technical acumen (unlike a Meraki, LinkedIn, or TalentBin). Thus the hiring profile is one of scale and cost reduction; junior staff straight out of college are less costly than more senior staff. When you look at the talent pools that both Yelp and Groupon have tapped into, it’s recent grads out of second-tier regional colleges with lots of graduate volume, particularly in humanities, communications, and business majors. In the case of Yelp, for their Tempe call center, that’s Arizona State University, or for their San Francisco sales center, it’s San Francisco State, San Jose State, UCSB, and so on. In the case of Groupon, much of their talent comes from Indiana University, De Paul, Ohio State, and other schools surrounding the Chicagoland area. Both companies found high volumes of charismatic, articulate, nontechnical staff to mop up thousands and thousands of ~$1K contracts here and there.