Measurement Need

Determining the number of applicants required to ultimately fill the vacant positions is needed.

Solutioni

The following formula can be used to determine the scope of the recruiting effort:

Where

R = recruiting

H = new hires required

S = percentage of recruits selected

A = percentage who accept

An illustration will help:

Based on these statistics, a minimum of 167 people would need to apply if the company wants to fill the twenty-five positions.

Impact

With salespeople filling a vital role (growing revenues, profits, and customers), identifying and recruiting the best talent is one of sales management’s most important tasks. Sales management may lead its own recruiting effort or, more likely, they will work with the HR department to coordinate the recruiting efforts.

Recruiting is an important activity and sales management must carefully plan the time and people resources required to do an effective job. In this basic example, 167 applicants may be a large number of applicants to review if your organization is small or medium sized. On the other hand, if you are IBM, then the number of people available from HR and field sales is large enough that the responsibilities can be distributed with lower disruption from regular work activities. No matter how large the organization, recruiting requires a keen sense of the following:

iAdapted from W. L. Cron, T. E. DeCarlo, and D. J. Palrymple, Sales Management (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004), 324.