More on graduate sales recruitment - our way
Even if you’ve only had one junior internal or external sales position since graduation, you’ve probably lots more to offer than you imagine. It could be the same even if you haven’t worked in sales yet.
The important thing is your character and your attitude. You can forget your existing CV for the time being. And anything you’ve already picked up about selling. If you have the right character for sales, we can help you with the CV and train you in the necessary sales skills. It’s what we do for leading companies every day.
Sales isn’t about fast-talking, but about listening, thinking and understanding how to build strong collaborative relationships with customers.
Are you making the most of your skills?
You probably already have many transferable skills that will interest our clients. But if you're like many graduates that we see – and go on to place in sales roles – you're probably not making the most of those skills and experiences.
Too often, with the best intentions, graduate candidates try to demonstrate capabilities that they don’t yet have on their CVs, but which they think they ought to try and demonstrate. Not by lying or misrepresentation, but by trying to shape a completely understandable lack of sales experience into something relevant to employers.
And that’s a mistake because enlightened recruiters like us, and our clients, understand that your working experience is limited.
Instead, what we and employers look for is life experience showing grit and character: the bar work; long, unpleasant hours in the factory; character-building vacation work that you stuck at when others didn’t; and loyalty or resilience demonstrated in other work, academic or personal situations.
We want to see genuine ability to get 99 ‘nos’ before hearing the golden ‘yes’. Call it stubbornness or resilience, it’s the stuff of great sales people and we’ll know it when we see it. You might not even know you have it…These character attributes are invaluable in sales. We can give you the required training, mentoring and on-job coaching. But without the right character attributes, the sales equivalent of Katniss Everdeen’s hunting skills and sharp instincts in The Hunger Games, or Tom Wolfe’s ‘right stuff’, they’ll be wasted.
To see if you have the 'right stuff' to make it in professional sales, we’ll talk on the phone first; it’s your opportunity to see whether you like us and our approach too. This is, after all, a two-way thing.
If our call goes well, we’ll invite you to Cheltenham for a sales awareness day. If you’ve ever been to other agencies’ mass recruitment sessions you’ll have a pleasant surprise. Forget big, impersonal, recruitment 'cattle markets' that end with recruiters picking two or three people out of 40 and sending everyone else home without any feedback or other positive note.
We meet every graduate before putting them forward to our client. We do this at our offices, where just half a dozen graduates spend time with us. You’ll need to get to Cheltenham under your own steam. But once you’re here, the informative day (including refreshments) is on us. Because we screen graduates carefully before inviting them, the success rate for attendees is very high. That means getting into our ‘bubbling’ graduate talent pool and the likelihood of soon being in the frame for high-quality graduate sales positions. Think starting salaries exceeding £20k pa, with significant OTE, a car, other benefits and ongoing sales training.
Even if we don’t take your application further after the assessment, you'll take away valuable insights and practical skills to help your job hunting and future career. Of course, you can apply again in future – people and sales opportunities change. We never say never.
When we take on new recruiter clients, we always explain the realities and challenges of their sales recruitment. It’s the same for graduates. Sales is inherently challenging, hard work and not always easy. But it's potentially rewarding, so if you think you've got what it takes, we should talk.
Because we need to maintain a constant talent pool of several hundred graduates, it’s always the right time to pick up the phone or email us and say you’re interested.
We’ll call you back quickly for an informal exploratory phone conversation. Next comes the sales awareness day (we run them all year). Then things can move fast. Within just six or eight weeks, you could be starting a new sales position. In some cases, we’ve had a Skype consultation on Wednesday, introduced graduate and client on Thursday and seen our graduate get an offer on Friday! Yes, we can change your career and your life that quickly.