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How to Find Top Talent in a Crowded Market
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How to Find Top Talent in a Crowded Market

The Betts Team
June 16, 2020

With qualified sales and marketing professionals flooding the job market, finding the right person for your open position can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Traditional hiring platforms are not up to the task of managing sales and marketing recruitment. They take over a month to get results, and because they’re usually generalized, they often overwhelm hiring managers with unqualified applications, phone calls, and the minutiae of resume review. That’s why, as innovation VC firm Andreessen Horowitz notes, leading employers will have to start relying on vertical-specific tools to make their hiring strategy more effective.

Know what you’re looking for, not just who

If you were hiring for a sales role at a technology company, here’s what you’d probably want to know about each candidate who applies:

  • Typical quota
  • Typical deal size
  • Typical sales cycle
  • Target salary
  • Verticals sold to
  • Industries sold to
  • Titles sold to
  • Preferred geography

Each one of these data points might be buried in an effusive cover letter, deep on page 3 of their resume, or missing entirely. The vital task of matching requirements with applications was enormous before the pandemic – over the last few years, when the job market was strong, employers at times saw an average of 250 applications per opening – and now 44.1 million more Americans are unemployed. Hiring managers are turning to vertical-specific hiring tools to help them pinpoint their criteria for top talent and focus their time choosing between qualified applicants instead of bulldozing an overloaded inbox.

What are the right tools for a pandemic-era hiring strategy?

Traditional job search platforms force sales and marketing professionals to shoehorn their experience into formats that are frustrating for them and nearly useless to you. Last year, it took an average of 38 days to fill an average position in any industry. That is over a month that a new hire is not earning for your company.

“The way tech companies currently hire – using spray-and-pray job platforms and informal coffee dates – will not scale to the needs of pandemic-era hiring.”

A new generation of tools can accelerate your hiring strategy by surfacing the key data points that you need to recognize top talent at a glance. Betts Connect is part of the vanguard of tools that focus on a particular vertical and are tailored to the unique needs of hiring managers in that industry.

Andreessen Horowitz says the way tech companies currently hire – using spray-and-pray job platforms and informal coffee dates – will not scale to the needs of pandemic-era hiring.

“Too often, the existing online jobs platforms are a futile exercise in imprecise drop-down menus and trial-and-error search terms just to surface the jobs or candidates you’re interested in, let alone qualified for … They require too much work to separate the signal from the noise, which impacts both the speed and quality of the process.”

The answer is vertical-specific hiring tools that have a feature set, user base, and business model that cater to one industry and do it well. They can focus on the data points that matter to that industry – in our case, marketing and sales.

Built for sales and marketing hiring managers

Betts Connect turns the professional profile on its head and serves up the data points you need, like quota attainment, percentage of new business, and average deal size. Candidates can highlight their big wins and the types of industries they have worked with. These are the things hiring managers need to know about a candidate to decide if that candidate is qualified not just for any role, but specifically for sales roles. That’s why Betts Connect is built around these particular attributes: It spares hiring managers the task of screening out candidates who are just plain unqualified for a sales role.

“These are the things hiring managers need to know about a candidate to decide if that candidate is qualified not just for any role, but specifically for sales roles. That’s why Betts Connect is built around these particular attributes: It spares hiring managers the task of screening out candidates who are just plain unqualified for a sales role.”

Hiring managers can browse thousands of vetted candidates or filter for a specific need, and get detailed profiles that cover important sales and marketing benchmarks. Then, they can reach out to candidates directly to get more information or set up a call.

Tools like Betts Connect can speed up your search for top talent and streamline the process so you can easily place new hires – even in a flooded market. Find out more here.