A commercial energy business in the Midlands came to us last winter with a problem that had very little to do with recruitment, at least on the surface.

Their sales team was converting leads at about ten to one. For every ten genuine enquiries, one turned into a sale. That's not a talent problem you can hire your way out of in an afternoon.

They'd tried. Twice, actually, through other agencies. Both hires came from inside the energy sector, both looked right on paper, and both had moved around a fair bit before landing with them. Neither worked out. And when a small, growing business brings someone senior in and it goes wrong, it isn't a clean failure. It's months of disruption, a demoralised team, and a founder starting to wonder whether the problem is the people they keep hiring or something they can't quite see themselves.

That's usually the point where we get the call.

Why we didn't start with a job advert

Here's what a generalist recruiter does with a brief like this: takes the job title, matches it against a database, sends over a stack of CVs of people who've done that exact role elsewhere. Which is precisely how they'd ended up with two hires who didn't stick.

We did the boring thing first. We went and sat with them.

Not a phone call. An actual visit, to understand how their sales process actually worked, where leads came from, what happened to a lead once it landed, and where in that chain things were falling apart. Because a 10-to-1 conversion rate is rarely just "the salesperson is bad." Sometimes the leads are poor. Sometimes the follow-up is a mess. Sometimes there's no incentive for anyone to chase the harder leads, so they don't.

What we actually found

A chunk of the problem wasn't who they'd hired. It was how the whole thing was set up.

So before we'd placed a single person, we ended up advising them on their commission structure, how to build a scheme that actually rewarded conversion rather than just activity, and how to incentivise the wider team to bring in better leads in the first place. That's not normally in a recruiter's remit. But if we'd ignored it and just dropped a brilliant salesperson into a broken system, that person would've become hire number three that didn't work out, and it wouldn't have been their fault.

Then we found the person. Some through advertising, some through direct search, four strong candidates in total, all of whom could actually do the job in the context we now understood properly.

What happened

They hired one of the four within two weeks of that first conversation.

She hit her annual target in three months. Her conversion rate came in at around four times their previous best. And she's still there, still doing a brilliant job, which honestly matters more than any of the early numbers, because a fast placement that leaves after six months helps nobody.

The client's own words afterwards were that we'd been "more than just a recruitment consultancy." We'll take that.

Why a specialist matters here, and it's not the reason you'd expect

The value wasn't that we knew the energy sector inside out. Plenty of agencies claim that.

It was that we treated a hiring problem as a business problem, worked out what was actually broken, and were willing to tell the client something that didn't immediately make us a fee (fix your commission scheme first). A generalist working from a job title and a database would have sent more energy-sector CVs, and the client would've been on hire number four by summer.

If you've hired for the same role twice and it hasn't stuck, the candidates probably aren't the issue. Something in the setup is. That's the conversation worth having before you write another advert.

Struggling to make a key sales hire stick? That's exactly the kind of problem we're built to unpick. Have a chat with the team, we'll tell you straight what we think is really going on.