Ready, Set, Grow: Model Recruiting Like a Sales Team

Nathalie Scardino, Vice President of Sales Recruiting, Salesforce

At Salesforce, we believe that our employees’ well-being directly affects the company’s success. Part of that well-being involves starting a new job with clear expectations. It builds trust. Similar to selling a product, our recruiters sell the full package experience of each role. That’s part of the reason we model ourselves like a sales organization.

In a high-growth company, we fuel our team’s growth by employing sales approaches. For example, we place a huge importance on forecasting. Every week you’ll find us swarming our forecast doc to analyze pipeline, week-over-week changes, and new hires. We examine it with the same level of scrutiny you would imagine a top sales leader to have.

Of course, this “recruitment as a sales model” didn’t happen overnight. Here’s an inside look at what we do and how you can apply these to your own recruitment efforts.

Move your recruiting team to talent segments.

To keep up with Salesforce’s growth several years ago, recruiting had to rethink our approach and team structure — just like any nimble sales organization needs to do. We moved into a horizontal model aligned to talent segments. That way, recruiters could see all open positions. And they could more easily share top candidates. Moving to a more open and horizontal model also gave us the opportunity to rethink and refine our interview processes across the entire team. As a result, the team became more efficient and empowered to grow the business.

It’s all about standardization and scale — both are critical to growing.

Turn recruiters into sales and talent experts and align accordingly.

As the organization grows, it changes — so must the recruiters’ efficiency and expertise. We made a strategic bet to align recruiters with different industries so they could become the sales and talent experts. We want to be as close to our internal sales managers as possible to ensure we’re in lock step with their business. So as the segments grew, we further aligned by regions. Just like a sales model, we want to make sure our teams are on the ground, hunting for new talent and generating pipeline.

To read the complete article, Ready, Set, Grow: Model Recruiting Like a Sales Team, visit Quotable.com.