There are lots of staffing companies, executive search firms & headhunters in the marketplace. If your company is looking to hire sales or marketing talent, how can you distinguish between these different service providers to determine who will do the best job of finding you the top candidates that you need?

One of the key things to look forprobably the top thing to look for in fact, is a company that specializes only in sales and marketing engagements. Search firms that specialize in sales and marketing are few and far between.

There are a lot of staffing and recruiting firms out there that specialize in finance, accounting, IT, etc, but very few that actually have a focus in the sales and marketing arena. Why is this? Because sales and marketing searches are the most challenging recruiting assignments to do correctly. Its much more difficult to measure the skills, experience and ability of a salesperson than it is to measure the experience of a programmer or an accounting professional. This is why a lot of companies that are in the staffing business shy away from doing sales & marketing search assignments.

Sales & marketing search specialists are staffed with VPs of sales, and or sales and marketing executives who have lots of experience in hiring this kind of personnelso what youre really doing is hiring their expertise at having done the same thing over and over and over again. They have much more rigorous processes, sales profiling tools and proven techniques to get at the heart of whether or not sales and marketing candidates are really capable of producing the results you need for your company. Likewise they have large databases and pools of talent that they draw from, since they make it their business to track the top candidates and make them available for client searches.

So if youre considering going outside or outsourcing your sales and marketing recruiting to a search firm, make sure that the one that you select is focused in sales and marketing only. If you do, you have a much better chance of attracting and retaining the kind of top talent that youll need in order to accelerate your companys sales growth.