Are you looking for salespeople in Kansas City? What is your basic strategy? If you are like most companies, you'll post a notice on your website, tell your sales and sales support employees you're looking for more salespeople, and you'll post a job on one of the job boards.
Resumes will come in, and you'll make a selection of the best candidates. Or rather, you're make your selection from the best candidates that happened to apply to your job posting, read your website, or know of your current employees.
So let me ask - do you really think that the best salespeople are answering ads off job boards or happen to know your sales coordinator? Are you really getting the best candidates, or are you getting the best of those who happen to find you?
If you're hiring top salespeople, chances are they found you. A good salesperson knows how to prospect, knows how to get to the decision maker, and knows how to close. So the question is why you're hiring people that send you a resume before talking to a decision maker. Do you buy from salespeople that send you a proposal before they get you on the phone?
So what do you do? You find ways to attract the right kind of people to your careers site. You make the careers section speak to them. You make it exclusive. And you give them a reason to find you.
Three short sugggestions.
1) Start a Sales blog: Brag on the people who make quota. Get clients to rave about your company. Present Case Studies. Promote contests. Offer direct contact to salespeople who call in.
2) Define what you want in a salesperson: Most job descriptions have no imagination. If you use the word hunter in your job spec, do you know what you are asking for? Are you paying a hunter what they want to make, and does the rest of your salesforce already hunt?
3) Promote from within: If you have someone who knows your products internally, give them a shot. Salespeople succeed and fail for a multitude of reasons. Don't assume that you want hairgel when someone with indepth knowledge of how your company sells may be the elephant hunter you're looking for.