As an employer with a job to fill, you have a few choices:

Advertise on your own website.

Every company should do this, as it shows the company is growing and successful.

You need a dedicated mailbox which is monitored. Give one person responsibility to monitor the inbox and forward interesting CV’s to the relevant hiring managers.

Advertise the job on jobboards or Linked In

Websites like Indeed, Reed, CVLibrary and Totaljobs are very valid ways to advertise your job. It is critical that you have a single person to monitor the CV’s, that individual needs:

• Strict criteria to judge the CV’s
• Clear guideline on locations and work permit eligibility necessary
• The ability to decide in the CV is worth forwarding on a single view,
• The ability to delete inappropriate CV and not be punished for making a  mistake.

Linked In offers the chance to advertise jobs specs too, but Linked In has a huge international following and it is likely to generate a huge number of CV’s for candidates who cannot work in the UK, often the influx of CV’s can be overwhelming from Linked In and unfortunately makes it counter productive to use Linked In. (this is a personal opinion, but it is shared by many)

Use a recruitment agency

A specialist agency (like Ambis) will be able to find candidates quickly and with a lot less hassle than other options.

Additionally recruitment agencies  will have niche candidates who are passively looking for that right job.

Furthermore a recruitment agent only charges if you hire someone and they actually start, you can still trying using other sources, and you only pay if the candidate you hire actually starts.

Interviewing advice for clients

This section is broken down into questions for:

• New business salespeople
• Account managers
• Pre-sales consultants
• Implementation consultants
• Application support staff
• Project managers

Interviewing New Business Software Salespeople

Any good salesperson can tell you what they achieved and earned last year. So you start with that.

You earned £40,000 base and £40,000 commission and you generated £800K in GP

How many deals is that? So a typical deal is therefore … XXX

Talk me through one complete sale that you did:

• Where did the lead come from?
• How did you progress that lead (who helped?)?
• How many meetings?
• Who was responsible for the demo, discovery, and scoping?
• Who did the paperwork?
• What was the value? (license, services)
• How much commission did you make?

If you want more advice on how to interview Salespeople, call Jake on 01923 859 262

Interviewing Account Managers

If you are interviewing account managers, you need to know how many clients they look after and who they are targeting.

Some account managers are targeted and paid on renewals, and some aren’t.

• Are they selling new licenses or extra services, or extra modules?
• How do they keep in touch, how often, f2f or calls?
• What are the key things they want to know about each client whenever they have an interaction?

If you want more advice on how to interview Account Managers, people call Jake on 01923 859 262

Interviewing Pre-Sales consultants

Questions to ask:

• How many pre-sales demonstrations do you do a week or a month?
• What is the level of complexity?
• Are you doing the discovery, scoping and architecture?
• Do you have standard demos, or how do you create a tailored demo?
• How many deals have you signed that are a result of your demonstrations?
• You are trying to discover if they are doing 10 hugely complex demos or 100 quick, simple ones. And then what results do they get?

If you want more advice on how to interview Pre-Sales people, call Jake on 01923 859 262

Interviewing Implementation Consultants

Questions to ask:

• Tell me about a project you worked on?
• What sector or business were the clients in?
• What was the approximate value of the project in monetary terms or consultancy days?
• What technology was used?
• Which bits of the Implementation process did you do?
• What value did you add? / what are you proud of on this project?

If you want more advice on how to interview Implementation Consultants, people call Jake on 01923 859 262

Interviewing application support staff

Questions to ask:

• How big is the support team?
• Is it the first, second and third line? What do you do?
• How many clients do you have?
• How many tickets do you get per week?
• Describe a typical day.

If you want more advice on how to interview ERP support people, call Jake on 01923 859 262

Interviewing ERP project managers

Questions to ask:

• How many PMs are there at your company, and how many consultants?
• How many projects would you typically manage?
• What size or scale were those projects?
• Were you involved from kick-off?
• How would you describe your responsibility for the functionality of the project?
• How would you describe your knowledge of: Finance/ Manufacturing/ Distribution/ E-commerce?

If you want more advice on how to interview ERP Project managers, people call Jake on 01923 859 262

Job title

Be specific, say exactly what they will be doing.

Location

Remote, hybrid or office based, those words are not enough today:

Say remote with 1 day per (month, 6 months or 12 months) in the office in Bristol.

Hybrid… how exactly does this work? The more details the better.

Office based – fine – but say something about the office (lots of easy parking, countryside location, fun environment, free pizza, gourmet coffee, casual day, anything).

Salary

Put what you can pay.

Saying depending on experience is wrong, it reduces the response and candidate don’t take it seriously.

Technical skills

Write the absolute minimum level of skills you would consider, be specific about the technology and version of products and then say what they will learn.

As a rule of thumb if you want 3 Specific skills you have to offer training in 3 others technologies.