Organizing the Sales Hiring Process
Don't wing sales hiring. Before the next great candidate lands in your lap, document your process: job descriptions, where you'll source, how you'll screen applicants, the criteria for each interview stage, who's on the hiring team, your interview questions and role-play scoring, an offer template, and a 30-, 60-, or 90-day onboarding plan.
By Chris Perry, OMG Certified Partner · Updated
Originally published in The Sales Recruit on June 19, 2025.
©️ Diego Marin - 2025
Hey everyone, welcome to the first issue of the Sales Recruit— Let’s jump into it.
Sales Hiring Reads of the Week:
- U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low - This presents a ripe opportunity for attracting top performers who are gainfully employed elsewhere.
- The New Must-Have Sales Skill for 2025? Resilience - OMG makes a compelling case for why Resilience is the critical skill for new hires this year, and shares how to measure it.
This Week’s Task: Get Organized
If you’ve run any hiring ads lately, you’ve probably seen that it’s chaos out there. There are way more candidates on the market than there are jobs, we’re getting flooded with AI resumes, ghost candidates who apply and then don’t respond to any follow-up, and more.
These conditions can drive us to settling too quickly for the first sales candidate with a decent track record and that we kind of hit it off with. Unfortunately, this almost always leads to disaster— long ramp times, disappointing results, and having to let someone go just a few months after hiring them.
How do we confront these challenges?
We need a system.
Just like we don’t want our sales reps winging it when they go out on sales calls, we shouldn’t be winging it when we’re scaling our growth engine.
Whether you’re actively hiring right now or not, this is the time to start pulling together and documenting your sales hiring process. The last thing we want is for a really fantastic candidate to land in our lap and we’re not prepared to thoroughly evaluate them in a timely manner. Just like in selling, time kills deals.
Things to consider preparing/documenting sooner than later:
- Job descriptions for our next few hires
- Where and how we’re going to source candidates and who will own managing that process
- How we will sort/filter applicants to decide who to invite to interview
- The milestones and criteria for advancing candidates through each step of our process
- The hiring team members, their roles, and how we’ll capture their feedback
- Our interview questions for each interview
- If we plan to have candidates do a role-play, how we will evaluate it
- Our offer letter template
- Our 30, 60, or 90-day onboarding plan
Need help/inspiration with any of the above? Email me and let me know.
Be well in the meantime, and good hunting!
Chris
Want help applying this to your next sales hire? See how Enki helps with sales hiring →
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