Organization for Recruitment and Selection of Sales Force

The organization for recruiting and selection of sales personnel varies from company to company. Company size, executives’ personalities, and depart­mental structure all influence the organization used. Companies with small sales forces sometimes assign sole responsibility for recruiting and selec­tion of sales personnel to the company personnel manager, but this is unusual. It is more common for the personnel department to handle cer­tain, but not all, aspects of recruiting and preliminary screening and for the sales department to handle other aspects of recruiting and screening and to make the hiring decisions.

Placement of responsibility for recruitment and selection of sales per­sonnel in concerns with regional or district sales offices also varies. These functions tend to be centralized at the home office when the firm requires high-caliber sales personnel, such as those needed to do technical selling. Other factors, for example, size of regional and district organizations and location of training programs, make it difficult to draw further generalizations. However, decentralized recruitment and selection result in reduced interview­ing costs and time, and facilitate the hiring of local applicants for sales work

Source: Richard R. Still, Edward W. Cundliff, Normal A. P Govoni, Sandeep Puri (2017), Sales and Distribution Management: Decisions, Strategies, and Cases, Pearson; Sixth edition.