If you're a Talent Acquisition Professional or a Sales Manager you already know that finding the right talent is hard. But new research has shown some surprising numbers on how difficult it is to find the right person for your company.

An 86:1 success ratio.

The statics compiled in the recruitingtrends report show that it takes small and mid-sized businesses an average of 86 candidates to make one hire. Out of these 86 candidates, only about 15 resumes make the cut, proving step one of the hiring process to be the least time-efficient.

Even if you're spending an average of 5 minutes reviewing each candidate, that equates to over 7 hours of work just to filter through the 86 applicants.

Out of the 15 resumes that make the cut, you're likely going to spend another 25 hours reviewing just those candidates, bringing the total time spent for one hire to 32 hours.

A Top of the Funnel Problem with Sales Hiring: 3 Solutions to Avoid Missing Out on The Right Talent

Where do the best candidates come from?

Contrary to what you might expect, applicants that apply directly to your company have the lowest hire ratio (1 of every 128), and make up almost 3/4 of the applicant pool.

However, applicants sourced by external recruiters have the same rate of offers made as the direct applicants at just around 30%.

Success is not guaranteed

Skipping through the multiple phone screens and on site interviews with various managers we get down to an offer, but for Sales positions the average acceptance rate is only 74%.

After spending nearly 32 hours finding the perfect candidate, you end up with less than a 3/4 chance of that candidate accepting the offer.

What does it all mean?

The job market is flush with candidates right now, which is great news for companies trying to find the top talent. Unfortunately this creates an extra burden on Talent Acquisition Professionals and Sales Managers looking to expand their teams.

As companies receive more funding, scaling organizations generally require 5-10 sales hires at once, as training a class of new hires is more efficient and allows managers to measure individual and team success more accurately.

While external recruiters may cut down on some of the initial screening, the quality of the candidates is generally the same as the candidates from your organic applicant pool.

How to cut down your time spent sourcing candidates

At LaunchSource we've developed some techniques to help Talent Acquisition & HR Professionals, and Sales Managers create better pipelines of talent. You can read more about creating efficiencies in your hiring process in many of our blogs including 5 Tips to Streamline Your Hiring Cycle and Losing out on Talent

We also specialize in helping companies find the top entry level sales talent (think SDRs, BDRs and Inside Sales Reps). We believe that no experience is necessary for the SDR role, and give every one of our candidates our Accelerated Ramp Up Training in the SDR role. This has resulted in 40% faster ramp up time for new hires, and 94% faster time to hire for Talent pros.

See how we've helped growing companies like PayFactors scale their sales teams.

‍