An international, French head-quartered animal and agriculture nutrition company was looking for a salesperson for their crop protection products.
The candidate needed to have at least five years of experience in sales, as well as an agricultural background so they could properly understand how to advise farmers on the best products for them. This role, while technically a sales position, involved more analysis of individual customer needs to help those customers achieve better results.
The challenge:
In this field, the main issue is a lack of mid-range candidates. This comes down to this being a relatively unpopular field at one point, meaning people were not moving into the field.
Due to this, candidates have a lot of choice in the jobs they can take, and salaries are inflated as companies compete for this talent. Candidates also know this so they know they can bargain for more money.
Other agencies were working on this role for several months before NonStop got involved. They were only able to find candidates at double the client’s budget for this role.
Our process:
Thanks to NonStop’s approach to consistent market building, where we make sure we are in regular contact with as many relevant candidates as possible, we had the perfect candidate ready to go so were able to send the first candidate instantly.
Leveraging our database and tools such as LinkedIn, we were able to map out all the potential candidates in the area. Unfortunately, candidates in this field aren’t often on LinkedIn, so we conducted more traditional headhunting to contact them. Many of them were known to us already, based on our market-building activities.
Through this activity, we found a second profile matching the client’s specifications and sent that over about 10 days after sending the first candidate.
From properly screening our candidates in the long-listing phase, we were able to determine the ones that were less concerned about the salaries, and more interested in aspects our client could offer, such as the positive environmental impact of their projects, the international nature, and the growth potential.
The outcome:
In the end, the client liked both our candidates and created a second role so they could hire them both.