Earlier this week, I took a look at recruiting lessons you can learn from marketing professionals.   In today’s post, I’d like to take a look at some best practices that can be learned from your sales team to help you improve your recruitment marketing strategy.

As I said the other day, there is no doubt that recruiting is becoming a more strategic function within the corporate world.  Companies are continually looking to improve their recruiting strategy to help them bring in more talented people in a more efficient way.  In order to improve their recruitment strategies, they can look no further than their sales organization to find ways to better recruiting top talent into their organization.

But what skills can recruiting organizations grow to learn from sales professionals?  Here are a few:

Keep Candidates Warm:  Sales professionals make sure to keep live leads warm by following up with leads on a consistent basis.  Whether it’s through email, SMS or phone, keeping in front of candidates that opt-in to your process through your job application or your Recruiting CRM is important in making sure your Talent Network is providing the most ROI for your recruiting organization.

Utilize References:  A good sales organization has a wide and large referral network.  Your recruiting organization should have one of these as well.  This referral network should not only include your internal organization but should include candidates in your Talent Network and past employees.  And make sure to provide meaningful incentives for good referrals!

Focus on customer needs:  The best sales people sell because they understand the needs of their customer base.  It’s important for any recruiting organization to ask & understand what is important to their most qualified candidates.  Once you understand that, make sure to highlight these important aspects of the employment opportunities you offer within your organization.

Create Statuses:  Any good sales organization will monitor every sales lead across several contact statuses in their sales funnel.  A good recruiting process should do something similar.  Make sure to keep track of where candidates get into your funnel.  Keep track of passive candidates that haven’t applied as well as candidates that have reached each interview stage.  Candidates that reach a final interview but don’t get the job can be great candidates to fill similar positions that open up.

Multiple Levels of Interaction: Sales organizations do a great job of providing several ways for customers to inititially interact with their organization and products.  Whether it’s free trials, 3 level of product packages or helpful free content, they try to interact with clients on some level.  Recruiting organizations can do the same as not all candidates are ready to apply and need options to connect with you.  Enable them to join your social recruiting channels, opt-in to email updates and apply to positions.  Let them interact with your employer brand on their terms.  And make sure to up-sell them to apply!

The recruiting function can learn a lot from their sales brethren with the 5 lessons above providing a start.  Try some of these tactics above in your recruitment marketing campaigns and see the results that come of it.