If there’s one thing you should know about Recruiters, it’s this: They are sales people in the truest sense of the word.
It’s also helpful to know that Recruiters match their clients (businesses looking to fill open positions) with their users (candidates and job-seekers like you).
Sales is a lucrative, competitive field that plays an essential role in driving revenue and profitability for all companies. However, it can also be a very difficult industry to break into without taking low-paying, slow-moving, entry-level positions.
That’s why taking advantage of opportunities in Recruiting is an excellent way to break into the industry with style. Here are four reasons why working in Recruiting is the best way to start your career in sales—and in general, too!
1. The Hardest Product To Sell Is Someone’s Future
When you work as a Recruiter, it’s about more than just selling someone or some company a product they’re going to use. It’s about selling people on a potential version of themselves.
Working at a leading Staffing and Recruiting firm like Apex means you’re going to get a ton of experience. You’ll have clients demanding talent with incredible skills and experience in diverse fields like backend programming and structural engineering. And while they’re the experts in their respective industries, you’re the expert when it comes to finding the right fit. But doing that is often tricky, according to Apex Corporate Recruiter Casey Weickgenannt.
“In recruiting, your product is people. And people can be very unpredictable,” she says.
It’s in this way that Recruiting poses the ultimate sales challenge: The stakes are higher than they ever are with a non-human product. I mean, is any product more involved in your life than your job? It’s essentially sales times two! You have to sell to the talent and to the employer. Every. Single. Time.
How’s that for sales experience?
2. You’ll Understand (And Enjoy) The Money Motivation
Recruiting is a sales position in many ways. But perhaps the most important one is that performance is motivated by a lucrative commission system.
At companies like Apex, Recruiters are rewarded with incentive bonuses and commission structures that can have a huge impact on compensation. For every contract a client of yours signs with a candidate, you get a commission based on the salary of the position you filled. This means people who excel in sales environments will be able to make as much as they can—and right away.
Learning to work with this kind of pay structure is an essential element of any sales career. Having the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow is a system that has formed all of the world’s greatest salespeople into the executives they are today.
3. You’ll Learn The Gold Standard Of Sales Strategies
If you’re interested in this career path, then you’ve probably heard the term “Inside Sales.” Yet you might not actually know what it means.
As Weickgenannt explains, “Recruiting is an Inside Sales position. With Recruiting, you’re showing job seekers how using Apex is beneficial.”
Inside Sales refers both to the fact that you work inside company property—contacting clients and candidates remotely—and the strategy of high-volume, highly involved contacts with clients. In Recruiting, your ultimate goal is to improve your client’s company and the candidate’s career by facilitating the perfect match. If you’ve done it well, both sides are equally happy.
Once you have experience with this, there’s no sales job that’s out of reach for you.
4. You’re Training (A Lot) With The Best
As a recent graduate or job-seeking senior, you probably know that most positions in sales either require professional experience or place you in an incredibly junior starting position. If you’re looking to get your career going ASAP, that probably doesn’t work for you.
At Apex, however, you’ll start with weeks of intensive training on the most important angles of the business, including interacting with clients, qualifying prospects, establishing contact, and closing deals. Apex particularly uses mentorship and bootcamp-style training sessions in order to get you ready to begin Recruiting—and therefore selling—as efficiently as possible.
Interested in getting your sales career started? Apex is hiring on WayUp now, so check out their open positions and apply!
