HRO Today July/August 2017 - 49

HRO Today Research
Recruiting Driving Revenue
Organizations that leverage best practices in sales hiring will
decrease time to fi ll and increase profi ts.
By The Editors
The impact of hiring the right sales people at the right
time cannot be overstated. Without sales driving topline
revenue, every other part of the organization-
including operations, marketing, and fi nance-will fail no
matter how well these departments have executed their
responsibilities. Recent research from HRO Today and
WilsonHCG shows that while 58 percent of recruiters track
the cost per hire of a sales position, they don't have clarity
on the cost of not hiring quickly. This means HR managers
are often lacking the information they need to make the
best recommendations regarding the urgency needed in
hiring sales representatives.
The study also revealed that HR managers don't have
the information they need to best convey to the C-suite
the importance of keeping their sales team fully staffed.
Organizations can quickly lose thousands-or even
millions-of dollars in sales if there are openings left
unfi lled for longer than necessary. A fully-staffed sales
team is critical to the bottom line.
By applying fi ndings from the study into the Sales Force
Recruiting Calculator (a free web-based tool on HROToday.
com), the impact on revenue of unfi lled sales territories
is clear. For example, a medium-sized company with 100
sales representatives would see a reduction in revenue of
$4.5 million per year when experiencing average turnover,
average days to fi ll, and average revenue per sales territory.
On the other hand, organizations can see a positive impact
on revenue when they reduce the average time-to-fi ll rate.
For example, a company with 100 sales representatives that
reduces their time to fi ll by 10 percent (from the average of
58.1 days) would see nearly $500,000 in increased revenue.
The same company would see an increase of $1.4 million if
there was a 30 percent reduction.
HR's use of sales force data in recruiting has impacts in
other ways, including:
* Among the 58 percent of respondents that do track cost
per hire, the average is more than $4,000. This amount
is exclusive of the opportunity cost of lost sales early
in a new hire's tenure, training, fi rst-year salary, and
incentives.
* The average time to fi ll a sales role is 58 days. This means
that for every representative that leaves an organization,
it takes more than one-quarter of the number of working
days in the year to replace them, a huge loss in sales
potential.
* Only 17 percent of HR recruiters know the average
amount in sales achieved in each territory. This
information is a key metric in quantifying the need for
optimal sales force recruiting.
* Seventy percent of respondents couldn't approximate
the percentage of time each sales territory has a fulltime
representative. Those that did know indicated that
91 percent of the time a representative is in place. This
means there is 8.2 percent ineffi ciency in sales territory
productivity.
About this study: In the fall of 2016, 91 HR practitioners were
surveyed online and all were knowledgeable about the key
performance indicators used by their company for recruiting sales
representatives and currently use a recruitment process outsourcing
provider. More details from the study can be found at
www.hrotoday.com/category/market-intelligence/research. The
Sales Force Recruiting Calculator allows any company to input their
own information to get more accurate estimates about the impact of
staffi ng levels on their organizations. The calculator is found at
www.hrotoday.com/time-fi ll-decrease-calculator.
JULY/AUGUST 2017
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HRO Today July/August 2017

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