The Sales and Recruiting Divide Is Costing You Hires

Krissy Manzano  (00:06)

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Talent GTM podcast. I’m Krissy Manzano, your host, and today I have Monika Chand with me.

Krissy Manzano  (00:16)

Monika is a world-class go-to-market recruiter. She’s been in the business since 2015, so well over a decade. And if there’s anyone who understands internal recruiting and all the dynamics that come with it, especially when it comes to working with sales teams, it’s her. So Monika, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad you’re here for this conversation today.

Monika Chand  (00:38)

Me too. Thank you so much for having me.

Krissy Manzano  (00:40)

I gave a little bit of your background, but I’d love for you to share your experience over the past decade in recruiting, and also what drew you to it.

Monika Chand  (00:50)

Absolutely. So I’ve been recruiting for over 10 years, and I started in an agency role. So I know what it’s like being an agency recruiter and then becoming an in-house recruiter, across everything from G&A to tech to go-to-market. But go-to-market is where my heart is. I love the volume, I love the pace, and I just love the talent we can bring to the teams, and seeing the organization grow. That’s really, really near and dear to my heart.

Monika Chand  (01:12)

Recruiting is something I didn’t choose on my own. It’s something I fell into. But I’m truly, truly blessed that I get to do something I genuinely love and am very, very passionate about.

Krissy Manzano  (01:22)

Yeah. And you’re also a working mom, so shout out, because

Monika Chand  (01:25)

Yes. Yes.

Krissy Manzano  (01:28)

it’s not easy. But I think it’s important for women to see that you can do it, and you can thrive and be a rock star like yourself. So today we’re talking about something pretty controversial. I have no doubt this episode is going to get some comments, but I think a lot of folks will be listening, because we’re talking about internal recruiting teams and sales hiring, and the misalignment that happens. Not just why it happens, but how to actually fix it. So if you’re on an internal recruiting team, or you’re a sales leader hiring alongside one, this episode is definitely for you. We’re going to walk through where this breaks, what good looks like, and why founders and executives should care.

Krissy Manzano  (02:14)

So just starting off: as we mentioned, you’ve been doing go-to-market recruiting in-house for years, across multiple companies and multiple economies. What does a broken sales and recruiting relationship actually look like when you walk into it?

Monika Chand  (02:28)

Yeah. This is something I see, sadly, way too often. There’s a strong us-versus-them mentality between the two groups. Sales blames recruiting for the lack of pipeline and sourcing, and recruiting blames sales for a really high bar. For example, sales leaders will say, “You’re not sourcing enough,” and recruiting will come back with, “Well, there are inconsistencies between your expectations and the talent market.” And that’s just at the surface level. If you start peeling back the layers, you’ll find there’s a lot more to it, and honestly, it all stems from misalignment. Misalignment on the candidates, misalignment on the profiles, uncalibrated interviewers, and inconsistencies in the process altogether.

Krissy Manzano  (03:10)

Yeah, absolutely. And when you walk into it, is there one side you think is more right than the other?

Monika Chand  (03:17)

No, I think both sides are equally right in their own ways, because you see it through your own lens. As a recruiter, I see, okay, here are the hurdles in front of me. How do I get ahead of them? How do I make an impact? How can I close these positions, while making sure I’m working collaboratively with the hiring manager? But at the same time, we all have our own expectations and experiences that shape how we see the talent market.

Monika Chand  (03:43)

It also depends on the company you’re at. Is it a startup? Is it an established company? What sort of logo do you have behind you? I think all of that contributes to the bigger picture.

Krissy Manzano  (03:53)

Yeah, absolutely.

Monika Chand  (03:55)

For me, I see it through the recruiting lens, because that’s the only side I’ve seen it from. But Krissy, you’ve been a sales leader, and now you own your own firm, so you’ve seen it from the recruiting lens as well. How has your perspective shifted? What’s your take on this?

Krissy Manzano  (04:12)

Yeah, it’s definitely interesting having sat on both sides: being a leader hiring during high growth, working with an internal team and with agencies, and now owning an agency and helping companies, sales leaders, and go-to-market teams hire. And I’m going to say this pretty bluntly, and I’m sure it’s going to bother some people, but I truly think it’s the truth. You have two departments competing to be the one in charge. This happens all the time with sales. And both can’t be.

Krissy Manzano  (04:40)

Internal recruiting, along with other departments, wants to be equal. They start operating as their own entity: “This is how we do it. We’re not your assistants.” That becomes the narrative. “I’m going to help you, but hold on, you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

Krissy Manzano  (05:07)

And then sales is stressed. They’re under a ton of pressure to hire, because when they don’t hire, there’s no capacity, and revenue for the entire company goes down. So they start pushing back: “I’ve got to have people in seats. You’ve got to be accountable for this too.” And nobody is actually running that relationship. Here’s the part people don’t like: in this relationship, sales is the client. If you have a hierarchy, they’re the ones at the top. That means sales calls the shots.

Krissy Manzano  (05:33)

Being the client doesn’t make recruiting, or any other department, less than. It doesn’t make the internal recruiting team unimportant. But what I’ve said for a long time, and I’ll still say it even though I’m not a sales leader anymore, is that revenue is what keeps the lights on, and recruiting exists to serve that. Not everyone at a company can be competing with the attitude of “I’m not here to support and serve you.” That’s not how businesses are set up. There’s a reason you have departments, and what each department does feeds sales. Once you stop fighting over who’s equal, you can actually build something. That’s my view from the sales side: “Hey, let’s have a conversation. Share with me what you’re seeing. But this is what I have to have.”

Krissy Manzano  (06:19)

I also find that a lot of the time with internal recruiting teams, the goal is obviously to reduce costs. So they’ll hire folks who have no experience in that area, which I think is changing a little bit, and they spread them across so many things. And if we’ve learned anything in business, it’s that spreading people super thin doesn’t turn out well. It doesn’t.

Krissy Manzano  (06:45)

So those recruiters feel underappreciated, and they’re often set up for failure. And what ends up happening is that the money you tried to save by having an internal recruiting team, you end up spending on an agency, who will treat you like the customer, get things done, and be hyper-focused, because they’re experts at it. So I think the whole model is often broken. But I think the biggest issue is the power dynamic, where you have two departments trying to be top dog. At the end of the day, remove the egos and ask: who’s serving who? It’s internal recruiting serving sales. That’s the bottom line. That doesn’t mean sales can’t be wrong.

Monika Chand  (07:25)

Absolutely. I think you bring up a really great point. A lot of the time, recruiting does feel like an assistant. When you’re a leader, you think, okay, I have these goals, I have revenue targets I need to meet, and I need X number of hires to get me there. So yes, internal recruiters can often feel like, “Hey, we’re just an assistant. We’re here to support them, but we don’t have a voice.” But I’m a strong believer that anytime I talk to a leader, we have a setting-expectations conversation.

Monika Chand  (07:52)

We really understand what each side is hoping to accomplish, and how we can do it as partners. We’re here to work together. We have the same outcome. Our goal is to fill the positions; that’s how our success is measured. And as a leader, it’s: how can I get the best talent through the door to help me generate that revenue, or meet that revenue target? But we have to do it from a partnership perspective.

Monika Chand  (08:18)

A lot of the time we lose sight of that, and that’s really, really sad, because that’s where the breakdown is. Also, trust. Anytime you work with a leader, and this goes for recruiting and sales, you have to take the time to build that trust and rapport. For example, anytime I join an organization, I don’t automatically assume my leaders or hiring managers know what I can deliver. It takes time to prove yourself. No matter how long you’ve been in the game, you have to continuously prove that you’re capable of bringing them the best talent. But at the end of the day, we have to do it collaboratively.

Krissy Manzano  (08:54)

Yeah. What would you say to an internal recruiter listening right now who’s thinking, “Hey, I hear what you’re saying, but that’s not my situation. My sales team wants all these unrealistic things. They want people hired so fast, and they do treat me like an assistant. They ask me to put things on their calendar last minute and aren’t respectful of my time at all. I try to be respectful of theirs, but they don’t match it.” How do you handle a situation like that? Because that most certainly does happen.

Monika Chand  (09:21)

Yeah, of course. We have to be prepared. As an internal recruiter listening to this, you have to be adaptable and flexible. As you said time and time again, they are your clients. And I think that’s why a lot of companies or leaders want to bring in an agency: “They’re going to treat me like the client, give me what I need and the respect, and just do what I need them to do without pushing back.” But that’s not the whole picture.

Monika Chand  (09:46)

As an internal recruiter, I think it’s really, really important to have a weekly or regularly scheduled sync with your leader. Really understand the expectations, and walk them through what our recruiting process is and what our SLAs are. But again, focus on being adaptable and flexible and able to pivot. Sometimes needs change, or expectations change based on the people we’ve hired or who’s gone through the interview process. It happens way more often than you’d hope that profiles change in the middle of a search. So be adaptable, and assume it’s coming from good intentions. It’s not about making my job harder, even if it feels like, “Oh my god, now it’s going to be 10 times harder to find the right person.”

Monika Chand  (10:34)

But as a recruiter, you should also set realistic expectations: “Here’s what you’re looking for, and here’s the talent market in the region, within the comp range you’re targeting.” So be that true talent partner.

Krissy Manzano  (10:48)

Yes, yes. You have to look at it as being a partner. There’s a phrase: pick your battles. When you’re supporting another department, whether you’re internal or external, that’s never been more true. If they treat you like an assistant for a second, remove your ego and go with it if it’s not that important. Move forward.

Krissy Manzano  (11:09)

The number one thing I’d say about working with executives and sales leaders is that you want to be calling things out before they call them out to you. If you do that, you’ll start to build trust. Then you can have those conversations very early on: “Hey, this is what’s working. This is where we’re seeing inconsistencies.” When they see you’ve got a grasp on the business, that’s where the trust comes into play. Because you never know what they’ve experienced previously, and part of the micromanagement is that they don’t trust it’s going to get done. When you start showing that prioritization and picking your battles wisely, they actually start to loosen up quite a bit. So I totally agree on being a partner.

Krissy Manzano  (11:45)

On the flip side, we just talked about sales calling the shots. Where do sales leaders get this relationship wrong, and how do you push back without blowing it up? What are they looking for that isn’t realistic?

Monika Chand  (12:03)

I had a manager who said this to me once: sometimes sales leaders have champagne taste on a beer budget. It’s so funny, but it really resonated. Because as a company, you have to think about who you are. Are you a startup or an established enterprise? Do you have a big name behind you? What sort of funding do you have? All of that factors into what your brand looks like. So when you go into the market trying to attract the best talent, what’s your value proposition? What do you bring to the table that candidates should gravitate towards or be excited about? But a lot of the time, leaders say, “I want the best of the best.” I hear it every single time: “I want the top 1% or top 10% of sales talent in my seats.”

Monika Chand  (12:47)

Great. But to attract and retain that sort of talent, what’s the value? Why should they come to your company? What does the growth potential look like? What does attainment look like? What does compensation look like? What does enablement look like? Are they being set up for success? What’s the territory? There are a lot of things really strong sales talent will consider. So are we there? What can we offer candidates that they’ll be excited about? Why should they even join? A lot of the time, leaders forget that when we’re interviewing candidates, they’re also interviewing us.

Krissy Manzano  (13:19)

Courting is so important.

Monika Chand  (13:21)

Yes, exactly. It’s really, really important. The other piece is that they sometimes want to throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. Trying different approaches without being really strategic about how we recruit.

Monika Chand  (13:36)

Like interviewing with no bar, with uncalibrated interviewers. “Just go in and do a gut check. Does this person meet what we’re looking for?” But one of the fastest ways to turn off a good candidate is uncalibrated interviewers. If you go into an interview process and every single person asks you the same questions, or vets you for the same thing, did you walk away knowing what you really wanted to know? Or are they just going to hire based on one thing, and not vet for the different areas you’d be tested on in the role?

Krissy Manzano  (14:09)

No, I think that’s spot on. And you know what’s funny? I can say this now, having been on the operator side and now being a business owner on the recruiting side. I hired for years. I got unconscious bias training, skill set and behavioral interview training, before anyone knew what that was. So I felt like I was really ahead of the curve, and I had incredible hires and incredible success. So when I started a recruiting company with my co-founder, I thought, “Well, we know how to hire really well, so this is going to be great.” And wow, did I have a lot to learn. It was a humbling experience. That was a shock to me, because I’d been finding my own talent and managing it all for years, since I hadn’t had a lot of success with recruiters.

Krissy Manzano  (14:53)

So if you’re a leader who’s been hiring for years, that doesn’t mean you actually understand the market. You most likely don’t, until you’ve worked in it as a recruiter. It’s hard to explain how different it is. But you’ve got to be able to show what we go through, and Monika, we’ve talked about this: a market map. Everyone has an idea of what they want. “I want them to live in New York, I want them to have five years of experience, I want them to have this revenue journey, and this, and this, and this.”

Krissy Manzano  (15:22)

Each of those qualifications and requirements is defensible on its own. But as you stack them, your talent pool gets smaller and smaller, while everyone thinks it’s huge. Because if you pull up a search in LinkedIn Recruiter, you see a big number. But when you actually go through and remove the job-hoppers and keep only the ones who really have the experience, it’s a finite number you’d actually want to interview. So your addressable market is much smaller. And I think internal recruiting teams, from what I’ve seen, with the exception of yourself, don’t show that data. Data is so powerful here. I’ve never had a client push back once we’ve shown them the size of the pool, because they see, “Well, I have 200 people in my addressable market. That’s it. And only 20% of those have even raised their hands to say they might be interested in a conversation.”

Krissy Manzano  (16:20)

We talked about recruiting in so many different economies. I feel like so much has changed since COVID, and companies haven’t gotten on board with the fact that they don’t have the same upper hand they had for decades. They still have an upper hand, but it’s much closer to being balanced. Curious about your thoughts on that.

Monika Chand  (16:42)

Yeah, that’s a really great point. I was actually going to talk about that in just a second. Prior to COVID, I was at a company where the leaders wouldn’t even talk to an account executive who’d been in their previous role for under two years. Because tenure shows: were they successful in the role? Did they hit their numbers? Were they able to make it past their ramp period? Have you been able to show you were successful in your previous role? What do the numbers look like? What does your quota attainment look like? Those are the things they were vetting for.

Monika Chand  (17:08)

And I’m not saying we shouldn’t vet for that, but we should also factor in, as you said, the economy and how it’s changed. I feel like post-COVID, the market has changed a lot. It’s no longer an employer’s market; it’s an employee’s market. No matter what anyone says. Yes, there are a lot of layoffs still happening in the tech space, but candidates are also being very intentional about where they land, especially the really good talent.

Monika Chand  (17:37)

So for me, I look at job-hopping. If it’s a consistent pattern, then yes, it paints a picture. But if somebody’s been in a role for under a year and they also have some long tenures, you take that into consideration. Maybe it wasn’t the right culture fit, maybe the org went through changes. Layoffs are still happening. So I don’t think we should hold such a strict bar if it’s just one or two short stints in a broader career. Post-COVID, and I say this quite a bit, a lot of us have figured out that life is too short to stay at a company where you’re not happy, or you’re not being set up for success. So people are choosing to leave sooner rather than wait around to hit some arbitrary one- or two-year mark that says, “Hey, I’m successful because I made it X amount of time.” If it’s not the right fit, people are leaving much sooner.

Krissy Manzano  (18:31)

Yeah. You have a whole generation of talent that went through a worst-case scenario together, at the same time, and they survived. And they’re thinking, “Even though it’s not ideal that I’m leaving this company that’s basically committing fraud,” which is a whole other topic in the tech world, “I’m choosing this because it’s important for my mental health. I know what’s happening here, and I need to go somewhere else and not spend more time here.” It’s set such a precedent.

Krissy Manzano  (19:03)

Even now, I’ve never seen health insurance come up this much. Not that people didn’t care about health insurance before, but now it’s, “How good are your benefits?” People who aren’t having children, or aren’t planning on having children yet, will say, “I need to understand your parental leave policy and how competitive it is.” And they might be years out; they don’t even know when they’ll have a child. But they care because these things matter to them. So it’s wild how different it is. And you’ve obviously lived all of those different versions, whereas a lot of people came in during COVID, so that’s the only world they know on the recruiting side.

Monika Chand  (19:40)

Yeah, you’re right. People are focusing on the actual, tangible benefits. It used to be, “Oh my god, we have happy hours, and we have all these amenities in our building.” Yeah, that was great. But now it’s, “No, those things aren’t important to me anymore.” I think the other thing we need to consider is that a lot of companies are remote or hybrid, and there aren’t many 100% on-site companies. So those in-office perks may or may not mean anything to the candidate.

Monika Chand  (20:09)

So we’re really looking at benefits. Before, it was, “Oh my god, they have a coffee shop on one of the floors. This is amazing, I’ve never had this before.” Now I’m like, okay, I’d rather have a better 401(k) match, you know?

Krissy Manzano  (20:18)

Yeah, right. A hundred percent. And just circling back to this question for sales: you have to court your candidates. “We’re this rising AI company.” Your pitch is the same as everybody else’s, no matter how unique it feels to you. And it is unique when you talk to a candidate about it, but everybody out there is pushing the same story of success, whether it’s real or not.

Krissy Manzano  (20:47)

You might know it’s real at your company, but candidates are seeing the same story everywhere. So you have to court them, which again means removing the ego. And courting is also really beneficial, because guess what happens when you court someone? They get comfortable. And what happens when people get comfortable? They show you who they are, and that’s what you want to figure out during the interview process: someone’s behaviors. So it’s a win-win for everybody. Honestly, that can be the difference between someone accepting your offer or going to another company, all because of the courting. Even if your pay is a little lower, or your benefits aren’t as good. Although I’d say if your benefits aren’t good, you’ve got to fix that.

Monika Chand  (21:26)

Yes.

Krissy Manzano  (21:26)

You mentioned in a prior conversation that sales and recruiting are two sides of the same coin. We just talked about the differences, so make that case.

Monika Chand  (21:36)

Yeah. I strongly, strongly believe it. Sales and recruiting really are two sides of the same coin. Sales sells the product every single day, but guess what? Recruiting sells the company every single day. So we’re both selling, just two different things, and they’re equally important to the company’s success. With recruiting, we’re bringing the best talent into the company so it can continue to grow, especially on the sales side. That’s something I strongly, strongly believe in.

Krissy Manzano  (22:04)

Yeah, I think that’s spot on. And the similarities go back to the market map. This is where I think knowing how similar recruiting is to sales really helps. In sales, you don’t just reach out to anybody. Even if you have an addressable market, which is always going to be bigger than your target market, like, “Hey, we have a $4 billion addressable market,” that doesn’t mean you’re going to get sales. So who do you target? Typically around 200 companies, and no more than that at a time, because otherwise you can’t be intentional. It’s really similar with candidates. That’s typically your pool size, depending on what you’re looking for and whether the role is in-office or remote. So I totally agree.

Monika Chand  (22:45)

I’d like to add on to that. We’ve talked about what the addressable market looks like, but think about it from an ICP perspective. For sales leaders, when you’re prospecting, you decide: this is my SMB segment, mid-market, enterprise, and strategic. You have an ideal customer profile for each of those markets. So why aren’t we doing the same thing on the recruiting side? What does the ideal candidate look like for each of these segments? What does this candidate need to have to be successful? Do they need prior enterprise experience? And how do you define enterprise, because every company does it differently. Is it revenue? Is it headcount?

Monika Chand  (23:29)

To my earlier point, you don’t want to just throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. Being really intentional and strategic shapes a better picture of the organization. It shows, “Hey, we really care about who we bring in, and we want to make sure you’re set up for success, so we look for specific skill sets and backgrounds.” For example, if enterprise for you means 5,000 employees and above, but you bring in somebody who’s only sold to companies with under 500 employees, you’re not setting that person up for success. Because guess what? There’s a drastic difference between selling to a small organization and a larger one, which may have a lot more processes in place, and leaders who evaluate different things when they’re purchasing software or AI.

Krissy Manzano  (24:18)

Yeah, I totally agree. As we wrap up, because we’re getting close to time: if a founder or CRO is listening, and their internal hiring team is stretched across 10 different roles, which we know happens a lot, unfortunately, to internal recruiters, what’s the one thing they should look at changing this quarter to make hiring for their teams more successful?

Monika Chand  (24:40)

I’d say recruiting isn’t only the recruiter’s job. It’s the responsibility of the entire organization. So once again, it’s a partnership. Work with your recruiters to define a strategy and approach, so you present a unified front on LinkedIn or whatever platform you choose. Just working collaboratively and being really intentional will take you a long way, because it’s a small pool of sales professionals in the market, and everybody knows everybody. How you leave those relationships, how you walk away from candidates who don’t make it through the process, matters. So making sure everybody has a good experience is very, very critical.

Krissy Manzano  (25:26)

Yeah, spot on. Outcomes are not a plan. “I need ten hires” is not a plan; that’s the outcome. So for both sides, to your point, the strategic partnership, and a plan that everyone is following and aligned with, matters. Monika, where can people find you and follow your work?

Monika Chand  (25:44)

Yeah, absolutely. I’m very, very active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there: Monika Chand. I love everything recruiting, so I’m happy to talk shop, collaborate, and answer questions. Once again, this is something I’m genuinely passionate about, so please, please find me on LinkedIn.

Krissy Manzano  (26:05)

Well, thank you for coming on the podcast today. I could talk to you about this forever. In fact, we have at times.

Monika Chand  (26:11)

Yes. Yes.

Krissy Manzano  (26:13)

But I’m hopeful the folks listening will really understand what they can control, and what they can bring to the table better. You can’t control what other people do, but there is an art to helping people partner together. And again, removing the ego and approaching things with a plan matters. So thank you for sharing all of your wisdom and experience with us today. Until next time, we’ll see you later. Thanks, Monika.

Monika Chand  (26:41)

Thank you.