Summary of the article:

Recruiting Independent Sales Reps
When sourcing chews up too much time, tapping an outside firm may be the most cost-effective approach.
By Fay Hansen, Workforce Management Online

This article is a case study on the company Books Are Fun, who recruits over 250 sales reps each year due to turnover and expansion. As a national bookseller servicing thousands of schools and businesses, there is a huge opportunity cost associated with having the right sales personnel in place.

The challenges that Books Are Fun faces are similar to many businesses. Identifying and accessing the right talent can be an enormous front end task (screening alone was taking 70% of the company’s hiring process in this case). Books Are Fun weighed the financial viability of talent sourcing in-house and decided to overhaul their process by outsourcing to a recruiting firm. Their goals included speeding up and improving the quality of hires.

The company wished to spend their time focused on the back end part of the process, i.e. getting to know pre-qualified candidates and assuring that they are truly qualified and that there was a good cultural/lifestyle fit. The internal staff’s time was reoriented to more valuable tasks than the screening and administrative processes. Another benefit the company enjoyed immediately is the instant scalability of the recruitment process associated with outsourcing these functions.

Books Are Fun’s results are significant. The cost savings has been important in terms of expedient sales force deployment and customer retention. Higher quality and better matched candidates has led to better retention; higher retention has lowered the costs of training and preserved the valuable customer relationships. The company’s outsourcing strategy is the most cost-effective and efficient staffing solution, and "The new RPO approach is already embedded in our going-forward strategy for recruiting," noted David Hammond, vice president of sales recruitment.

Redfish Technology offers many levels of staffing solutions from providing a completely outsourced candidate recruiting function to Contract work and Temp-to-Hire. Call us today to discuss how we can access the best talent, more quickly, with the least cost to you. 

- A Recommendation from Redfish Technology, Executive Recruiters in High Tech and Green Energy.