How to get more candidates for your sales vacancy

Are you having trouble filling your sales vacancy? We hear you! It can be very challenging to find the perfect salespeople for your company. And yet, finding them is crucial for the success of your business.

So why is your sales vacancy reaching so few people? And how can you increase the number of candidates? Find out below!

Why nobody is responding to your sales vacancy

Do you want to know why your sales vacancy is not attracting enough candidates? Here are 2 reasons:

1. Thousands of sales vacancies

Have you ever searched for ‘sales’ on LinkedIn Jobs? No? Go ahead and look up the term right now. On any given day, you will find more than 12.000 vacancies in Belgium alone. That’s a lot of competition for your own sales vacancy – and that’s just LinkedIn.

In today’s market, everybody is looking to hire good salespeople. So it takes very little time for your sales vacancy to reach the bottom of the pile, buried under a non-stop flow of fresh job postings. Of course, advertising can help you get your sales vacancy out there and keep it on the first page. But that will require a serious advertising budget…

2. What’s in it for them?

But what if we told you that the large number of sales vacancies isn’t your biggest problem? Of course it’s a lot harder to be noticed when there is so much competition. Yet your sales vacancy is still bound to be read by many candidates. So why else is no one applying? If you ask us, it probably has a lot to do with the way your sales vacancy is worded.

On the one hand, we see many companies use up a lot of space to say things like ‘You need to be able to close during meetings’ or ‘You need to convince people through the phone’ – things that every salesperson knows before reading your vacancy. That also means it’s time to stop asking candidates questions like ‘Are you a hunter?’ or ‘Are you excited every time you bring in new clients?’

On the other hand, most sales vacancies don’t detail what candidates have to gain from taking this particular position at your particular company. What’s in it for them? As most salespeople are not actively looking for a new job, this is a very important question. Answering it in your vacancy will help you attract more candidates that are willing to leave their current position.

Our top tip: write your vacancies as if you were to write a proposal for a specific client! What’s your value proposition?

How to increase the number of candidates for your sales vacancy

After interviewing thousands of sales candidates over the past years, we have come to the conclusion that salespeople want to change positions for 3 main reasons:

1. They need a challenge. They want to learn something new and exciting and step out of their comfort zone. Think of a salesperson who wants to start selling to bigger clients to close more complex deals, or someone who simply wants to sell different products to different types of buyers.
2. They want more responsibilities. Maybe your candidates want to help determine the sales strategy? Maybe they want to help you develop a new vertical or start coaching people? Either way, they want to take their sales game to the next level.
3. They are looking for a different company culture. People need to feel good at their company, and maybe your perfect candidate is ready for a change of environments. This could be a different management style, a different mindset, a more flexible or more professional context,…

Can you offer at least one of these three propositions? Then use this to your advantage when writing your sales vacancy. Focus on your added value in your proposition and ‘sell’ your company, and we guarantee that more people will apply to your next vacancy.

Good luck!

Can we help you with sales recruitment?

Even with these tips, sales recruitment remains a difficult task, especially in a specialized field like tech sales. Do you need some help finding your next junior sales, sales manager or sales VP? Get in touch with us via info@headlight.be or +32 471 64 90 09. We’d love to help you!