How to recruit salespeople: 6 practical tips
Recruiting salespeople
In my recent articles, I wrote about costly recruitment mistakes and about how much recruitment mistakes can cost. This time I want to share 6 practical tips for recruiting salespeople.
Everything here comes from my own experience. I spent close to 10 years recruiting for sales and sales-adjacent roles. I made plenty of mistakes along the way and watched others make theirs. On top of that, I have been doing sales myself for a decade, and in recent years it has eaten up most of my workday. So I have seen this from both sides — as the person hiring salespeople and as a salesperson. I think at least a few of these tips will save you some headaches.
Let’s get to it.
Recruiting salespeople - verify references!
Sales roles almost always come with specific targets. Hitting those targets is usually easy to measure. So if you expect a candidate to deliver results, check whether they actually delivered in their previous jobs. The simplest way? References.
How do you get references from a candidate’s previous employer?
Before the GDPR, this was straightforward. You asked the candidate for a contact at their old company — a direct supervisor, typically. The candidate could refuse, but an unexplained refusal raised a red flag. If they agreed, you called the person and asked about the candidate’s work habits and results.
After the GDPR, things got murkier. Fortunately, on the question:
“Can you contact a candidate’s previous employer to obtain information about them?”
The Polish Data Protection Authority says:
“It is inadmissible for a prospective employer to obtain information about a job candidate from their previous employer unless the candidate has given consent for the above.
It should also be noted that a candidate’s submission of references does not authorize the employer to contact the party that issued them in order to obtain additional information about the candidate. It should be remembered that the disclosure of personal data to the employer takes the form of a statement by the data subject. The prospective employer therefore cannot contact the previous employer for information about the tasks the candidate performed or for an opinion about the candidate. During the recruitment process, the candidate themselves should be the source of information regarding their professional history” (source: https://uodo.gov.pl/pl/file/1469)
Read the first sentence again — a contrario, we can gather information from a previous employer as long as the candidate consents.
The rest of the Authority’s response deals with a different scenario: when a candidate attaches reference letters to their application. The Authority makes clear that submitting reference letters is not the same as giving consent for you to call the former employer directly. You need explicit, separate consent for that.
Of course, references alone are not the full picture. But they can be extremely useful during candidate selection.
In my career, I hired experienced candidates several times without checking references. One person turned out to have never actually worked at the company listed on their CV. Another had worked three months, not twelve. A third completely missed their sales targets — though in the interview they swore they were way above plan.
Bad luck? I don’t think so. A CareerBuilder study (link to the study) found that nearly 60% of hiring managers had caught lies on candidates’ resumes. You might not notice the problem when you are only running a few hires. But the more processes you run, the more likely you are to get burned. References help you filter out candidates who are hiding things — or flat-out lying.
Recruiting salespeople - ask about KPIs
Most sales positions are tied to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you are looking for someone experienced and self-sufficient, ask them about their metrics. The usual ones: call volumes, emails sent, meetings booked, number and value of proposals, revenue generated.
After you explain what the candidate would be selling at your company, ask them to propose their own KPIs for the role — and to explain why. This one question tells you a lot about their experience, how they think analytically, and what kind of goals they set for themselves.
If the candidate does not know your market or product well enough, pay attention to how they react:
- Did they ask you for more information and then build their proposals on it?
- Did they improvise well?
- Did they improvise badly?
- Did they hide behind “I don’t know the market” and dodge the question entirely?
You would be surprised how much you can learn from this one exercise alone.
Recruiting salespeople - present the KPIs
Once you have heard the candidate’s take on metrics, show them your actual KPIs. If there is a big gap between what they proposed and what you expect, dig into why.
Ask the candidate:
- What do they think explains the difference?
- What do they see as the upsides and risks of working toward your KPIs?
- What about the KPIs they proposed — what are the trade-offs there?
Their answers will tell you whether they actually understand why certain metrics matter — or whether they are just reciting numbers from a previous job.
Being upfront about goals — both short-term and long-term — saves you the cost of a bad hire. I have seen too many recruitment processes for sales roles where nobody actually told the candidate what targets they would be expected to hit. That is a recipe for failure. This is especially true for experienced candidates who already have their own ideas about what “working in sales” looks like. You need to put those expectations on the table early, or both sides end up disappointed.
Recruiting salespeople - check if the candidate can actually sell
An experienced, good salesperson should be able to sell themselves brilliantly. Period. Their attitude should be professional, their statements specific, their voice confident. After the interview, your gut reaction should be: “this is the one.” If a candidate cannot sell themselves to you in an interview, how are they going to sell your products to strangers?
During the conversation, watch not just what they say but how they say it and how they carry themselves. Their appearance, how they speak, the documents they brought — all of it tells you how they will represent your company. The overall impression matters a lot too. Some people can make even the dullest topic sound interesting. Give someone like that the right sales arguments, and you might have a star on your hands.
Here is what I look for during the interview:
- Confident but not pushy. There is a difference.
- Calm voice, but not flat or monotone.
- Genuine interest in what you are saying — do they ask follow-up questions?
- Do they try to steer the conversation? Asking their own questions, adding unexpected points, jumping in at the right moments?
- Assertiveness — can they disagree with you without being combative?
- Can they talk about failures, not just wins? No failures usually means no real experience. Only people who do nothing make no mistakes.
Recruiting salespeople - personality is the most important factor
Experience is overrated. I am not saying it does not matter, but it is not the thing I would bet on first.
In the past, I built entire sales teams from interns. We hired people straight out of university with zero professional experience and put them through intensive, hands-on training. Looking back, I can say confidently: the best employees we ever had came from those internship programs.
That tells you something. I would rather hire someone with a natural talent for selling but no track record than an experienced salesperson who just does not have the right disposition.
What makes a good salesperson?
My short list:
- They can hold a conversation that people actually want to be part of
- They have a drive to hit ambitious goals — not just coast
- Their personal conduct is impeccable
Recruiting salespeople - sales in the digital world
If your salesperson is not comfortable online, you have a problem. Outside of a few specific roles (think: salesperson at a brick-and-mortar store), sales work happens digitally. Meetings are virtual. Leads come through the internet. The time people used to spend driving to meetings now gets spent in front of a screen. The internet is where you find clients, where you talk to them, and increasingly where you close deals.
A person responsible for sales should feel as comfortable online as a shark in the ocean. This matters even more when the salesperson is also responsible for finding their own leads.
How do you test this in practice?
A couple of questions I like to use, along with what a good answer looks like:
- You have one week to build a database of 250 companies in Warsaw from industry X and reach the decision-makers. How do you go about it? Good answer: I get a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, search for companies and decision-makers, then reach out by email, LinkedIn, and phone.
- Our CRM has 100,000 companies. You have a month to contact all of them. What is your plan? Good answer: I use a mass email outreach tool like Woodpecker to send all of them a sequence of emails.
Recruiting salespeople - summary
Sales is hard work. Hiring salespeople is even harder, partly because the bad candidates are often the best at interviewing. They know how to say the right things. That is why you need a process that goes beyond the conversation — verify past results, have an honest talk about targets, and pay attention to whether this person actually has the instinct for selling.
Do the reference checks. Talk about KPIs before anyone signs anything. Watch how the candidate carries themselves when they are not rehearsing answers. And do not overvalue experience at the expense of personality — some of the best salespeople I ever hired walked in with zero experience and outperformed everyone within a year.
DISCOVER ELEMENT!
Maciej Michalewski
CEO @ Element. Recruitment Automation Software
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