In today’s episode of the ‘Sales Samurai’ podcast, host Sam Capra, who helps marketing leaders in the retail space go beyond the sale/transaction talks with guest Mike Thompson, Partner at Spark Recruiting. He is discussing why recruiters have to be sales professionals. He shares a great approach for sales leaders around hiring candidates as well as insights from the candidate standpoint.

Episode Highlights

• 01:40 – Mike says, his background is exclusively in recruiting. He has been in the industry for about 13 years.
• 03:20 – Mike learned a lot about selling and recruiting as you can sell software, widgets, whatever it may be. 
• 04:39 - How are you differentiating yourself from the 1.5 million other competitors that are also trying to hire sales talent?
• 06:30 – Some organizations are pivoting quicker than others and realizing that they have to be more proactive and sell to potential candidates.
• 08:20 – People want to be inspired by who they're working for more than the company they're joining, mentions Mike.
• 10:20 – Remote nature of work these days is a good thing for some companies and not so good thing for others, it’s depending on how you're situated and set up. 
• 12:30 – It's going to continue to get more and more competitive to find talent and retain it as well, it's going to continue to be a problem.
• 13:37 – Mike shares, the first question he always likes to ask is when you're hiring a salesperson, and what does success look like for the successful individual in a year? 
• 16:11 – You need to start thinking about how you sell the role and how you can simplify what that job is?
• 17:31 - There's a reason why referrals are the best source of talent attraction. 
• 20:41 – There's not enough money that is going to sustain someone in that role long term if you just have a terrible relationship with your boss.
• 22:40 – Sam asks, what does the first year look like for a person from a candidate profile standpoint?
• 24:47 - If you’re a salesperson looking for a job, and you want to follow the leaders on LinkedIn, you get to see what they post, what they're talking about. 
• 26:50 – Mike says, he coaches a lot of his clients and sales leaders to take stock on how candidates are selling themselves because that's their best sales foot forward. 
• 28:05 – If you're hiring a sales individual, and how they approach you is how they're going to approach your clients, says Mike.
• 30:00 – Sam points out, if you're going through the process of navigating on LinkedIn, then you'd want an engaging leader, creating content, commenting on it, and creating a personal brand for them.
• 32:25 – Mark states, Automation, and AI Technology do a great job of analyzing resumes, but you're not hiring a resume, especially in sales. You're hiring somebody that's being tasked with creating a relationship and having conversations with customers.
• 35:23 - You need to be clear on what it is you're looking for, and realistic with that, instead of thinking somebody is going to come in and they're going to bring all these accounts, and all their customer lists over.
• 37:04 – Mike brought up outside of what's the type of qualities candidates want to look for in a leader, points out Mike. 

Three Key Points

1. You need to be creative in terms of how you're building your team and not only from an attraction standpoint, but that helps with retention. You can't just throw money at people; you have to invest in the leaders and place them at the core of your hiring campaign because they're going to attract the people that want to follow them that worked for the