Facing stiff competition to recruit top sales performers, organizations that take a passive approach cannot achieve desired results. The Forrester Sales Talent Recruitment Waterfall helps align HR and sales recruitment processes to promote an ongoing flow of potential high-performing candidates. This toolkit contains resources that help revenue enablement leaders navigate the sales recruitment effort and plan, execute, and optimize their sales recruiting processes.

These are the most critical mistakes that are an outcome of not using a structured approach to partner recruitment (see Figure 2): Reactive vs. proactive selection. Rather than actively searching for the best-fit partners, partner recruitment often involves waiting for partners to come to the company through traditional outreach methods (e.g., email, LinkedIn, phone calls) and chance meetings at industry events.

Hiring Managers And Recruiters Achieve Recruitment Success Together Involvement from hiring managers and their teams is critical for recruitment success. Acquiring talent is a team sport, with recruiting and hiring teams working closely together at each stage.

This report outlines best practices on how organizations can recruit, develop, and retain top digital talent.

This report outlines the trends affecting how to recruit, develop, and retain the best digital talent.

By investing in a more rigorous and consistent sales recruitment process, organizations can increase the likelihood that the decisions of their hiring managers are sound. The benefits of a more methodical process are significant, based on a decline in forced and voluntary turnover rates — with involuntary annual turnover in sales organizations averaging 9% and voluntary turnover averaging at 10%, according to Forrester’s B2B Sales Survey, 2023.

Effective onboarding plays a crucial role in seamlessly integrating new B2B sellers into a company’s culture, processes, and revenue motions. While our research supports prioritizing onboarding quality over speed, revenue enablement leaders must strive to optimize each new representative’s journey. Identifying reps’ existing competencies and allowing them to bypass selected basic training modules enables them to focus on mastering the competencies that are most relevant to immediate success. A tailored approach empowers reps to effectively contribute to their new roles, fostering efficiency and engagement throughout onboarding. This is a snapshot of Forrester’s data on sales rep onboarding.

Recruitment still matters. AI-moderated interviews scale research, but if you’re not recruiting the right audience, you will scale the wrong insights. Recruiting the right participants is key to ensuring high-quality insights and successful AI-moderated studies. Many vendors provide user panels — either proprietary ones or through partnerships — and you should follow recruitment best practices, such as inclusive recruitment and strong screener questions, to reach the right audience.

Whether to conduct research within communities or recruit participants from a panel. Vendors in this evaluation approach recruitment differently. Some focus mainly on research within communities of customers, with panels as a secondary option, while others focus mainly on recruitment from panels. Organizations planning research mainly with their own communities of customers and noncustomers will benefit from community-focused platforms.

Next, choose a recruitment and reward model that fits your culture: Adapt recruitment to culture and design meaningful, tested incentives -- especially nonmonetary -- to engage and motivate champions. Then, establish the community, not just the role: Build an engaged champion community that fosters connection, peer learning, and sustainable interaction via diverse channels and rhythms.