May 2002
Local Profiles: Long Island - Past Articles
SalesRecruits.Com
Long Island company can beef up your sales force.
By Christy Mulligan
Finding the right people to sell your technology and software products can be an arduous and expensive process. In an industry that requires breadth of knowledge of precisely what you're selling and to whom you can sell it, a business often needs to invest in recruiters who will deliver top-notch sales people, but at a hefty price. We recently spoke with Steven Morgan, CEO of Long Island-based SalesRecruits.com about the company's unique alternative.
Tell us about PeopleComm and SalesRecruits.com.
PeopleComm was founded in 1999. Since our inception we've planned our business around SalesRecruits.com, a niche online recruiting service focused exclusively on our target market of software and technology companies.
You launched SalesRecruits at a time when dot-coms were either fleeing or falling off the Internet bandwagon, a risky endeavor. Has the site been fairly successful amid the downturn?
Despite the .com at the end of our name, we have been able to grow a profitable business by delivering a service that is valuable and in demand, even during an economic slowdown.
Revenue generation has been a real concern for software companies, so they are turning over salespeople and management who aren't producing. At the same time, our clients are under pressure to cut costs and do more with less. Senior level salespeople who can effectively sell large-ticket solutions have traditionally been hired through headhunters at an average of 25 to 30 percent of a candidate's first-year salary. Access to SalesRecruits.com for an entire year costs less that what a company would pay a headhunter for just one hire.
We have the right business model, and we've been fortunate in that some really high-profile companies were early adopters of our service. These companies enjoyed a low cost-per-hire and fast time-to-hire with our service, and they have served as spokespeople for our company. In any business, success breeds success.
Hiring good salespeople is a difficult and often fruitless process for many companies. How does SalesRecruits.com ease that burden?
SalesRecruits.com contains thousands of enterprise software and IT-solution sales professionals, and every candidate who applies for membership in SalesRecruits.com must fill out an online questionnaire. We ask questions about the candidate's technology experience, vertical market experience, and sales performance history. Then the candidate's application and résumé are reviewed by one of our staff. Only half of the candidates who apply to SalesRecruits.com get approved into our database. If a candidate does make it in to SalesRecruits.com, then our clients can review an unedited copy of his résumé and completed questionnaire. All of this up-front screening really saves our clients a lot of time and frustration. We free our clients up for the most important task of interviewing the really qualified candidates we've managed to put in front of them.
What are the benefits of focusing solely on recruiting and employing salespeople in the tech industry?
The Internet recruiting industry is chock-full of companies who are a mile wide and an inch deep-promising candidates for practically every position in every industry. We provide an outstanding service because we are an inch wide and a mile deep. Our niche focus is our value, and we are committed to our business model over the long haul.
What's next for SalesRecruits? Anything exciting in the works?
We are launching a service as a companion to our Web site. CardView.Net is an online searchable database containing the business cards for thousands of sales, business development, and marketing professionals, who have recently attended a software or technology industry trade show. I can't say anything else right now, but you'll be able to visit us soon at CardView.net.
do you know a local company we should cover? Let us know about it. Send your local profile candidates to Christy Mulligan.
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