Recruiting is Sales | A Short Essay
Talent acquisition is and has always been a sales job. A recruiter’s entire purpose is to convince top talent to join a company. Even more difficult, unlike a traditional sales representative, recruiters must execute a “double sale” — once to sell the company to the candidate, and once to sell the candidate to the company. Not only is the sell twice as hard, but the ramifications of such a weighty decision have a substantial impact on both an individual’s personal and professional fulfillment as well as an organization’s ability to succeed and thrive. The importance of a perfect fit between employer and employee cannot be understated. But how does a recruiter swimming in a messy, infinite pool of data points and social networks even approach the search for this ideal union?
An essential component of any successful sales process is pipeline management — a systematic and visual approach to selling a product or service. Sales pipelines are constructed using sales process engineering, the application of scientific and mathematical theory to optimize the success of a particular sales process. Given the congruence between sales processes and recruiting processes, it’s obvious that any modern, effective recruiting system will require comparable tools for quantifications and metrics. Candidate pipelines are essentially sales pipelines, and expecting recruiters to manage them without the latest technologies and analytics is analogous to expecting a sales team to operate without a CRM.
