Challenge: attracting skilled talent to meet regional hiring needs.
A multinational electronics company, which serves as a leading innovator of solutions that empower people to perform efficiently in their work environments, aimed to better attract top sales talent across competitive markets nationally. The talent acquisition (TA) team needed improved tools, strategies, and expertise to engage high-caliber candidates, particularly in new regions. A strategic hiring overhaul led by an outsourced TA partner was essential to drive business outcomes.
As the company’s recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider, we identified three main TA challenges to solve:
- Competing for skills: The TA team faced competition from tech companies in AI, machine learning, and cloud computing. To stand out, the company needed a strategic partner to help highlight its strong brand reputation, trusted customer relationships, and commitment to innovation.
- Localizing hiring strategies: The company's national TA approach missed opportunities to adjust for local market conditions and candidate motivations (i.e., reflecting the local cost of living and marketing a role’s unique qualities in each community). To overcome this, the company needed a strategic partner to help emphasize how candidates could grow their careers in local communities with the support of a large, national company.
- Vetting candidates efficiently: The company lost valuable time sifting through candidate profiles manually. This opened pathways for refining qualification targets and advanced screening processes to filter out unsuitable applicants.
Solution: tailored strategies to elevate TA.
We transformed the company's hiring practices with a nationwide sourcing strategy customized to regional needs. Our success stemmed from decades of sales hiring success, market-leading intelligence to inform decision-making, and the breadth of service required to secure high-value sales talent:
- In-depth market research: We relied on our vast industry and client expertise to identify which factors attract top sales professionals and how to market the unique aspects of each role in different markets. By using advanced data analysis tools and sophisticated talent trend reporting, we tailored job requisitions and created AI-driven recruitment workflows that identified and resolved any obstacles before they occurred.
- Targeted marketing strategies: We designed marketing campaigns aligned with local candidate motivations to attract the right sales talent in each market. In rural areas, we emphasized the positive impact candidates could have on pillars of their local communities, like hospitals and schools, while showcasing entrepreneurial growth potential in urban areas.
- A rigorous candidate vetting process: We partnered with the company’s leadership to set requirements across locations, created unique selling points for each office, and aligned qualifications with hiring managers’ needs during intake calls. Our screening process minimized recalibration, filtered out unsuitable candidates, and ensured that only the most qualified talent was presented.
- Data-driven compensation enhancement: We tapped into our proprietary data intelligence platform, Sevayo®, to analyze compensation targets by merging the company’s internal data with external market benchmarks. This approach let us provide comprehensive, tailored analysis and recommendations. Working with the company, we optimized compensation disclosures across job boards while ensuring compliance with salary transparency laws. This approach balanced presenting enough detail on commission models to draw in sales talent, without revealing too much to competitors to mirror in their own compensation strategies.
Result: accelerated sales hiring and talent quality.
- 40% reduction in time-to-accept: Cut the acceptance time from 63 days to 38 days, surpassing the 60-day target significantly
- 25% increase in sourced leads: Improved sourcing efforts, which led to a larger and more diverse candidate pool
- 8% reduction in requisition aging: Decreased the volume of aged requisitions from 32% to 24%
- 3.7:1 submission-to-offer acceptance ratio: Exceeded the 5:1 target ratio for qualified candidate submissions (i.e., those who passed our rigorous vetting process) to accepted offers
Driving these results had an exponential business impact. By reducing the time-to-accept ratio and improving candidate quality, we helped the company activate sales talent into new and existing markets faster. This hastened team performance and directly impacted the company's bottom line. The outcome is a supportive, dynamic environment where sales professionals can thrive and build satisfying careers.
This content was originally published by Sevenstep. Kelly® acquired Motion Recruitment Partners, including its talent acquisition brand Sevenstep, and integrated Sevenstep within its KellyOCG® business.
