To fill open sales roles, consider upskilling Great Resigners

Hiring is tight for sales teams, but one method might help expand the labor market: upskilling.?

Upskilling originally meant teaching existing employees new skills, but its meaning is now being expanded to helping individuals identify transferable skills from one job to take a step into sales. In the wake of The Great Resignation, this could be particularly useful to sales leaders open to hiring workers who fled hospitality, retail, and foodservice industries. Think barista to a customer service rep, or tour guide to marketing specialist.?

LinkedIn’s Economic Graph illustrates how this can be achieved. The screenshots below show how skills learned in one role can translate into another. ‘Skills Overlap’ shows how strongly the skills overlap: dispersed squares show a loose correlation, with the match shown as a percentage. Stacked squares show a stronger correlation. ‘Skills to Build’ straightforwardly denotes which skills an aspiring seller should hone.

Tour guides have experience with event planning and social media and with a little digital marketing training could fill the position of marketing specialist.

Baristas are particularly strong in communication, teamwork, time management, and customer service—all skills event specialists need. But they may need training in social media marketing and event management to succeed on the job.

Meanwhile, food service workers are great at organization, cash handling, and customer service. With a little training in sales and data entry, they could level up to a customer service representative.

So, to attract Great Resigners who are looking for sales positions but might not be a perfect fit, Jane Ashen Turkewitz, president and chief talent officer of Hi-Touch Executive Search, says that companies have to be “open-minded,” since upskilling is something of a departure from how they used to hire.

“For a long time, companies were looking for purple unicorns to fill their positions. I used to call them rainbow unicorns,” she said. “Everybody was consolidating positions. They had one person doing a, b, c, and now X job. And when they fill that person’s spot, they add another role or responsibility to the position, and they’re looking for someone who has all this experience wrapped up in three years on the job.”

Furthermore, sales managers who don’t look for ways to creatively expand their labor pools might risk being left behind. The Great Resignation shows no sign of stopping, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2021, 47.8 million US workers left their jobs voluntarily, the highest number since the Bureau started tracking full-year data 20 years ago.

Such companies might even have to change their hiring philosophy if they want to fill roles, especially junior positions. “There’s a dearth of talent and people need to open their eyes and hire more like Google and Facebook do, looking for mindset, energy, and willingness to learn—those things can be more important in a candidate’s success than a year’s experience calling on pharmaceutical companies.”

More immediately, upskilling could be the key to retaining current sellers. “The number one reason people leave is because they stop learning, they’re not being coached,” pointed out Ashen Turkewitz. “They’re not moving forward. It’s a misnomer when people say younger generations are lazy. They want to learn.”

Furthermore, data shows that employers are open to hiring from within their ranks too. According to Randstad Risesmart’s Career Outlook for Q3 2021, 68% of employers were “optimistic about filling roles with current employees.”?

But there’s a wrinkle. Only 43.2% of employees were optimistic about finding new jobs internally, which was an almost 10 percent drop from Q2 2021. Further, there’s a disconnect on what types of skills would be important to learn, said Dan Davenport, CEO of Randstad Risesmart: “Individuals are telling us that they want to learn new skills to be able to grow and develop their careers, and businesses want to train their employees so they can advance within the company. But for some reason, they can’t get on the same page.”

To bridge this gap, it might mean that sales managers need greater insight into what their employees’ day-to-day activities are like, and open the upskilling conversation from there. “Companies that want to be successful are implementing strong learning and development platforms, and with that has to come training,” said Ashen Turkewitz.