Turn Your Sales Recruiting Upside Down

What if radio revolutionized sales recruiting? Let’s explore that idea from multiple angles, including how it could work, what challenges it might solve, and what kind of transformation it could bring to the recruiting landscape.

Before we begin, you don’t have to do ANYTHING suggested here. Come up with your own ideas. Just do something different than what you’ve been doing.

Stop Recruiting Only When You Have An Opening

Continuously recruiting sales talent instead of only looking for sales talent when you have an opening in this case literally means creating a written sales recruitment strategy that involves the market manager or owner and the sales manager actively pursuing speaking engagements with networking events (groups) such as BNI and others, chambers of commerce, rotary and others. Make the subject sales because everyone needs it. Talk about sales fundamentals, the importance of sales culture, the power of marketing and that others should do what you are doing – recruiting sellers all the time.

In case you are wondering, I am suggesting that between your market manager/owner and your sales manager, at least one of you should be speaking each month year-round.

Don’t Only Look For Radio Salespeople

Ask candidates to tell you the first thing they ever sold. Instead of looking only for radio sellers, do more. Look for attitude, passion, desire and competitiveness first. And look for hunger.

Seek people who do details, focus on activity. Not for people who talk like radio salespeople throughout history.

Create Your Own Recruiting Company/Advertiser

What if you created your “own” sales recruiting firm and use morning or drive-time shows to reach commuters who may be passive candidates — listening during their job dissatisfaction hours? You will discover opportunities you may have never had access to in the past.

(City name) Sales & Marketing Headhunters

“Local and regional marketing, promotion and advertising companies are looking for the most talented and creative salespeople in (city). Call (phone number) and answer three (3) important questions that can determine if our clients would consider you one of the best salespeople in (city) or go to (special website) and take our quiz.”

Great salespeople will want to know how they measure up.

Use Storytelling As A Recruitment Tool

Radio can be used to tell compelling stories about the company culture, team wins, sales incentives, and career growth — content marketing meets recruiting. 

Power Up Testimonials

Successful salespeople could share their stories, acting as authentic voices that resonate more than a written job ad. Today we can video the stories, edit them and place them on websites and in social media in addition to ads on the air to attract more people like the best salespeople.

Problems This Could Solve

Access to Passive Talent

Great salespeople often aren’t browsing job boards. Radio reaches them where they are — especially in the car. Think about the percentage of salespeople always in the car. Or running across YOU unexpectedly in the market in a way that makes them aware you are looking for great sales talent.

Imagine continuous recruitment that leads you to fundamentally understand where the best sales talent is in your market all the time.

Brand Awareness

When local companies hear recruiting happening on your air, in your socials, and on your website by “a local recruiter,” it may inspire them to reach out and become a potential new client. Not a bad side effect, is it? Brands are not simply radio stations and digital opportunities. Your sales team should have a brand, and maybe your recruitment should have a brand.

Candidate Filtering

You can create a special phone number for potential recruits to call “your” recruitment company. Create a questionnaire that allows you to filter candidates. Change the ads often. Let me repeat that again – change ads often.

Real-World Tactics That Could Work

(City Name) Sales & Marketing Recruiting Podcast

Imagine launching a podcast that is shareable in social media and on your websites that focuses on marketing, helping clients connect the dots to new customers in the market today, and the benefits of working in a marketing business that involves advertising, events, social media and digital, personality endorsements, and more.

Promote the recruiting podcast regularly on-air, on your websites, and in your social media.

Recruitment Jingles

Gone are the days when you have to buy expensive jingles. Utilize A.I. and create unique jingles for “your” recruitment company and use them EVERYWHERE to promote opportunities. If they can sing it, they can remember it. If you’re not memorable, it won’t matter.

Stop Messing Around – Experiment

Again, you don’t have to do any of these things. Brainstorm your own ideas to turn over a new leaf in recruiting. 

Find new ways to get attention, sift through other sales and marketing individuals and organizations organically and continuously, and make it known in your market that you are looking, create “your” own recruiting company (or both).

Right now, you don’t have enough salespeople to see and sell all the opportunities in your market. How is that okay?

If local radio revolutionized sales recruiting, it would turn job ads into storytelling, interviews into entertainment, and passive listeners into active applicants. It could revitalize how your company attracts sales talent by focusing on engagement, authenticity, and human connection.