Sales remained a generalised function for a long time, but now we see many companies, and rightly so, breaking down their sales function into different parts to increase efficiency, effectiveness, and overall sales performance.
Generally, the roles are segmented according to the sales funnel. Broadly, the sales funnel consists of three stages:
- Awareness stage,
- Consideration stage, and
- Decision stage
At the top of the funnel are SDRs who hunt and approach new leads. BDMs and Account Managers are the middle and bottom-of-the-funnel roles that oversee SDRs and take the prospects through the consideration stage to the decision stage. Lastly, there are customer success people who take care of the customers during and after the sales process to ensure quality service.
The talent function is similar to sales and consists of three main activities:
- Sourcing,
- Screening, and
- Managing the hiring process and making offers.
However, despite it following the same general process, most companies refuse to segment their talent function into different stages, and rather maintain that their Internal Recruiters continue to manage the full recruitment cycle.
At a minimum, the ‘Talent Funnel’ should be broken down into two parts – sourcing and recruiting. Screening candidates and managing the hiring process are the parts of a recruiter’s job and segmenting these two will oversimplify the process. But sourcing is different from the other two activities.
Sourcing is the top-of-the-funnel activity of the talent function – similar to SDRs in sales. They are responsible for approaching the potential candidates and building a talent pipeline to ensure that only engaged and qualified candidates are moved forward to the recruiters.
In simple words, Sourcers are the SDRs of the talent function.
Why Break Down the Sales Function with SDRs?
Salespeople used to work from a traditional sales floor, contacting prospective customers through the phone. Now, the job roles have become more strategic and segmented based on the type of prospecting/selling that is most effective for a given ICP and persona.
The strategic approach of sales management/development leads organisations to increase profitability and customer satisfaction simultaneously.
With account managers and customer success people, sales development reps can now focus on their core competency – prospecting. It enables them to forward only those leads with a high chance of closing. It also helps them to spend more time reaching out to customers who are more likely to be interested in products like yours. And, it enables customer success people and account managers to focus primarily on farming – rather than hunting.
By focusing on prospecting as a singular component of the total sales process, SDRs can give prospecting the focus it deserves. As one of the primary top-of-funnel activities bringing prospects into the sales cycle, this laser focus on prospecting has lead to the rise of deep market segmentation, building of multiple personas, the regular use of video and voice note outreach methods, and more – all aimed at eliciting a response from an already pre-qualified potential customer.
The result of this laser like focus on prospecting increases both efficiency (as SDRs are focusing on this only) and effectiveness (they are actually better at prospecting than BDMs or account managers).
Without this strategic segmentation of the sales function, you’d have less customers coming into your sales pipeline, a loner sales cycle, and less desirable unit economics.
Modern talent functions are moving on the same trajectory of segmenting the various components of the talent function, and one of the best ways to break this down is into two main activities – sourcing and recruiting.
SOURCERS: The SDRs of Talent Function
Similar to the job of sales development representatives, sourcing is the primary top-of-the-funnel activity for the talent function. It is the process of approaching passive and active talent to ensure that only qualified and engaged candidates are sent forward to recruiters for further screening.
In the same way an SDR will segment their market, highlight the relevant personas, and initiate creative outreach to engage a prospect, a Sourcer will perform extensive market and competitor research, highlight qualified candidates, and initiate outreach to pass qualified candidates over to the Internal Recruiter
And the result is not all that different either; with a decreased time-to-hire (sales cycle), an increase in number of placements (sales), and a reduction in agency spend (increase in revenue), allocating a Sourcer for your talent function just makes sense.
As well as increasing overall performance of the talent function, there are a myriad of other benefits, too.
Since the start of the pandemic, 61% of recruiters have reported an increased level of stress. 19% of recruiters reported a drastic increase in stress levels. Segmenting their job and helping them by hiring a Sourcer will help them relieve stress.
In addition, sourcers also help in enhancing the overall employer brand image. When someone from your startup is constantly in touch with the candidates – it sends a positive vibe and improves the overall candidate experience. With this proactive approach to prospecting talent, you get access to passive candidates (qualified candidates who are not actively looking for jobs but will welcome a suitable offer).
Sourcing is a time-consuming task – and if your recruiters are stuck here, they won’t be able to produce good results at their core job. Simply put – Sourcers make your internal recruiters look good.
As well as being time consuming, it is also an entirely different skill than interviewing and managing a hiring process. It requires continual upskilling in new marketplaces, technologies, and talent pools to enable you to stay up to date and access the most relevant talent pools for your open roles. Leaving your sourcing to your internal recruiters is costing you access to the best talent, purely because, despite their best efforts, internal recruiters are not skilled to such a high degree in this single, yet vital, part of the recruitment process. And, they are very skilled at actually screening and closing roles – what they should be spending their time on.
So to summarise: SDRs both decrease sales cost and increase customer throughput, and Sourcers both decrease costs and increase talent throughput.
Sourcers are the SDRs of the talent function.
If you’d like to find out more about working with a Kandidate sourcer, CLICK HERE to complete a short form and a member of the Kandidate team will be in touch.
