Sales Partnerships, Inc. - Sales Recruitment Initiative of the Year

Company: Sales Partnerships, Inc., Broomfield, CO
Company Description: Sales Partnerships, Inc. is the premier direct sales outsourcing company in the world, offering branded representation that delivers rapid revenue lift for the most influential B2B firms in the world. Whether it's brand activation, customer acquisition, or retention, SPI is the leader in providing scalable and proven solutions to the Fortune 500.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Recruitment Initiative of the Year

Nomination Title: SPI Successfully Combining Machine Learning and Pod Based Recruiting

Briefly describe the nominated organization or individual: history and past performance (up to 200 words):

Sales Partnerships, Inc (SPI) provides field-based turn-key sales outsourcing, contract sales, and brand engagement services for Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. We engage face-to-face with a brand’s customers while providing complete transparency and accountability. As a specialist BPO company in sales, our calling card has historically included fielding and managing successful teams in a matter of days and weeks that would normally take quarters or years to deliver, while still providing the gold standard for brand protection.

The COVID-19 pandemic suspended all field activity in early 2020 during the initial shutdown phase, which included recruitment. However, as the economy began to open back up and people returned to work, SPI faced multiple challenges on the recruitment front. First, we had to hire back a large volume of sales reps, and quickly, in order to cover lost ground. But, our staffing needs were also constantly changing and shifting in cities and states across the US as virus numbers rose and fell.

As a result, the SPI recruitment team combined prior award winning solutions with implementation of a "pod based" recruiting system to yield faster and more predictable results despite a difficult recruiting environment.

Outline the nominated achievement since July 1 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):

SPI developed a new component of our recruiting process in 2020 that improved speed and quality of sales recruiting, "pod based recruiting."

Each recruitment pod is made up of a group of 3-4 recruitment specialists including sourcers, recruiters, and hiring managers.

In the pod system, the candidate conducts an initial metric based video interview with the recruiter, followed by a two-part interview that includes behavioral assessements and role-play. The last interview is a deep-dive interview with the hiring manager exploring elements uncovered in assessments and role-play.

Because SPI uses a metric based interviewing approach leveraging data from two decades of assessments compared to training results and field results (analyzed using AI solutions), it allows members of the pods to quickly come to speed. Rather than a 60-90 day ramp for new recruiters, this shortens that time to 14-28 days to full ramp to target.

Combining metric approaches with a tighter-knit pod system gave SPI the benefits of both the large scale recruiting floor with the quality of high touch boutique recruiting shops.

This new approach improved retention and sped hiring by more than 20% as detailed below - despite the targeted talent we sought being harder to find than SPI had ever encountered.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):

Attached you'll find our Field Sales case study for 2020, detailing the field activity and sales performance that was made possible by this new approach to recruiting and hiring.
Also attached is a document detailing the technology used to support the recruiting effort (a prior gold Stevie award winner.)

Explain why the achievement you have highlighted is unique or significant. If possible compare the achievement to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the nominee's past performance (up to 250 words):

One of the biggest benefits of the new pod system for recruiting is increased hiring speed.

After the initial COVID-19 lockdown in Spring 2020 when all field activity was suspended, we had to conduct nationwide rolling blitzes in areas where it was safe to operate in order to make up for lost ground in Q1 and early Q2. The pod system enabled us to do this.

Whereas most recruitment processes take, at minimum, -2 weeks, under the new pod system SPI is able to identify a candidate, fully recruit and interview, and start the onboarding process in 1-2 days.This happened while speeding ramp of new recruiters by more than half.

The teams hired exceeded production and quality control standards of previous teams using our prior methodology.

This achievement was exceptional because of the difficult recruiting environment we faced. Due to Covid restrictions - we had to narrowly target exactly where teams could safely work. We know that travel time into market has a negative impact on both production and retention. In addition to more narrow recruiting targets, skilled field sales personnel aren't unemployed as unemployment rises. The last person you let go is your best sales rep. Lastly, we operated in short term blitzes where only the top producers were retained.

That combination led to the most difficult recruiting environment for field sales in modern US history.

SPI met therecruiting goals, on budget, in 75% of the target amount of time despite those headwinds.