How to Sell Your Employee Experience to a Sales Rep

What do sales and recruiting have in common? A lot more than you might think. When it comes down to it, a recruiter essentially sells a job, a team, and a company to their candidates.

When your job seekers are sales reps, you’re selling these things to a salesperson, which can be a bit intimidating. Sales reps are familiar with the sales pitch, so you need to make extra sure yours is authentic.

Yet that doesn’t mean you can’t use some tried and true sales tricks to make your job pitch. Here are six tips to help you sell sales candidates on your employee experience:

1. Evaluate Your Target Candidates

A strong sales strategy focuses on creating distinctive experiences for the customer. The same is true for a strong recruiting strategy. To create distinctive experiences, you have to first understand whom you’re selling to.

Evaluate your candidates by answering the following questions:

• What are your company’s mission and vision?
• What skills does your ideal candidate need most?
• What are the hiring team’s most significant current pain points?
• What skills or experiences do your top hires tend to have in common?
• Where does your ideal candidate spend most of their time?

Use this information to understand and identify the kinds of candidates whose values align with your company’s. This is the first key to getting candidates on board with your employee experience.

2. Evaluate Your Competitors

In addition to your candidates, you also need to look at your competitors. What are other companies doing better when it comes to attracting top sales talent? What does your company do better than anyone else? Some questions to consider include:

• What kinds of candidates are your competitors targeting?
• What does your competitors’ recruitment marketing look like?
• How do your competitors’ employee experiences compare to yours?
• Where do you have the advantage?
• Where are your disadvantages?

Don’t forget to conduct a salary comparison so you know how to position your compensation package in the market.

3. Utilize Data

Data analytics can take your research to the next level by helping you identify what you’re already doing that’s working and what’s not. Look at the data around your employer branding, applications, interviews, and offers extended.

Any opportunity you have to collect data during the recruitment process can tell you a lot about your candidate experience. This information helps you pinpoint the employer branding messages that attract the best-fitting candidates.

If you don’t have access to quantitative analytics, you can also use qualitative data you’ve collected in conversations with candidates. What aspects of the job were they excited about? What gave them pause? By leveraging this data, you can better prioritize the right messaging throughout your recruitment process.

4. Embrace Visuals

Candidates will be more engaged if they can visualize the employee experience. This means you’ll need to leverage graphics, photos, and video content to attract sales reps. For example, you can use YouTube, Instagram, and other social platforms to share videos explaining what a sales rep’s average day is like at your company. You could also create an infographic depicting your company’s perks and benefits. Every visual tied to your brand matters, so make each candidate touchpoint eye-catching.

5. Work With Influencers

It’s no secret that working with influencers is a trendy way to promote a product, but did you know that you have your own built-in influencers who can talk about your employee experience? That’s right — your employees are the perfect influencers when it comes to sharing your brand with candidates.

Identify a few key employees who are already working in roles similar to the one you’re recruiting for, and ask them to speak on their experiences in a video or written testimonial. Job descriptions can attract someone to your company, but employee testimonials will really engage candidates by giving them a better look at what it’s actually like to belong to your organization.

6. Customize Your Pitches

Just as a sales rep must tailor their pitch to their customer, a recruiter must tailor theirs to their candidate. Personalization is an incredibly successful sales tactic, and it works wonders in recruitment, too.

This means treating candidates like individual people wherever possible. Consider what you know about candidates based on their resumes, cover letters, or interviews, and then share content about the employee experience that you think will resonate with them.

Personalization may sound like a lot of work, but you can develop a few templates to pull from once you start to notice patterns among your candidates. Paying attention to the little details helps turn interested candidates into accepted offers — plus, it will keep candidates engaged with your company instead of your competitors.

Karyn Mullins is president of MedReps.com. Connect with Karyn on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.