Hiring salespeople is harder than hiring almost any other role, and it goes wrong in fairly predictable ways. If you have run a few sales searches and come away frustrated, the odds are you have hit one or more of these. The good news is that every one of them has a fix once you can see it clearly.

1. The best people never apply

Strong salespeople who are hitting target are not scrolling job boards. They are busy earning. So the pile of applications to your advert is skewed towards people who are available, and available is not the same as good. If you only ever hire from inbound applications, you are choosing from the wrong pool. Getting round it means going and approaching the people who are not looking, which takes time and a network most in-house teams do not have.

2. Charisma gets mistaken for ability

Salespeople interview for a living, in a sense. A confident, likeable candidate can sail through an interview and then not sell a thing, because presenting well in a room is a different skill from closing deals over months. You get past it with structured questioning that cuts through the polish, plus real evidence of past results rather than claimed ones.

3. The process is too slow

Good candidates have options and move fast. If your process involves three rounds over five weeks, the person you wanted has accepted something else by round two. And sales talent especially will not wait around. Tighten the process, make decisions quickly, and do not lose someone brilliant to your own diary.

4. No clarity on what good actually looks like

A lot of sales hires fail because nobody defined the role properly first. Hunter or farmer? New business or account growth? Long complex sale or fast transactional one? These need very different people, and hiring a great version of the wrong type still leaves you short. Get specific about the actual job before you write a word of the advert.

5. Counter-offers snatch them at the last minute

You find someone good, you make the offer, and their current employer panics and throws money at them to stay. It happens more than it used to. Beating it is partly speed and partly managing the candidate honestly through the decision, so the counter-offer does not blindside you both at the eleventh hour.

But most of these come down to the same root, which is that sales recruitment is a specialist job done well or a guessing game done badly. We spend our time on exactly these failure points, approaching the passive talent, screening past the charisma, and keeping the process tight enough that you do not lose people. Our piece on why great sales talent is so hard to find goes wider on the market. When you want a hand, here is how we work, or book a call and tell us what keeps going wrong.