PreSales Talks: Presales Recruiting with Josh Hill

Today we had Josh Hill from Ikuto join as a panelist to give the Recruiter's view on the PSC Clubhouse call!

Having a dedicated recruiter saves time.  Time it would take an internal or generalist recruiter to fill a presales role without the right candidate network

What is different from regular recruiting?

• Would you engage in using someone who doesn't know about presales to help you do hiring?

• Most recruiters don't really get presales.

• Boolean search not great for something like presales with lots of different job titles.


Get in the mind of the recruiter.

• Use variants of job titles to talk about your work. 

• Don't use acronyms. 

• Use Presales, Solutions Consultant and other terms in you CV (multiple)

• Get them to swap your CV once your actually in the process.

What gives you the most visibility as a candidate? What is the best thing?

• Use creativity in your CV.

• STAR method (situation, task, action, result)


Should candidates reach out directly to recruiters?

• Yes they could have lots of open roles

• They love growing their network

• They might have particular roles

• Do reach out proactively - even if you only think you'll be looking in the future


How do you compare people with experience in presales and new people?

• A genuine desire for presales is sometimes more desirable than just the raw experience.

• 70% of hiring managers want someone from their customer ecosystem.


Any preference on the kind of company to what they are looking for?  Do start-ups look for more presales experience?

• Start-ups seem more domain knowledge focused!

• Seems reverse of the expected.

"The great resignation"

• 21% of presales people are shifting roles each year.  

• Presales most important part of the sales cycle

• Salaries are rising

• IC roles with 150K bases!

• Candidates want to work somewhere that believes in presales

• Startup salaries seem lower compared to bigger companies.

• Look also at worklife balance and other factors. Don't base your decision only on money

• Autonomy is important to individuals as well. 


How does the recruiter help on the offer stage and what candidates should ask for

• Recruiters shouldn't try to push the boundaries of what candidates ask for

• Ask about who is the responsible manager, what has been happening with roles in the past, and how they make selections.



What is the incentive for the recruiter?

• Retained search - get paid for the search and for finding

• Contingent search - usually based on the salary of the hired individual.

• Could be based on OTE or Base or other included pay.

• Internal recruiters - don't necessarily get a commission

• What if it wasn't a good match and the candidate doesn't stay?

• Trust is very important and something the builds up a lot of two way value.


How do recruiters help with encouraging diversity?

• They help because they can go wider than your network


Future of recruiting

• We're at the beginning of an exciting future

• Investments to increase

• Better tools to do the work

• Sales might be less relevant

• Buyer enablement is the new way