I sat down with Maestro Group’s Senior Recruiter, Jose Fuentes, to find out how to find the best sales professionals, what today’s candidates want, tips on job descriptions, and helpful insights on hiring in 2026. Regardless of the size of your team and whether you outsource recruiting, these observations are helpful to leaders at any sales organization.
You can teach the hard skills—hire for the soft.
Think carefully about the qualifications you want your new hire to possess on day one. Most SaaS employers seek individuals with years of experience in their target industry. The idea is that the ramp time will be shorter. “It’s more important to find an individual who is coachable, intelligent, curious, and can articulate their selling strategy,” says Jose. “It’s much harder to teach these soft skills than it is the technology.”
You can ask questions that will tell you whether a candidate is a quick learner. Ask how they’ve gone about mastering the details of other platforms and solutions they’ve sold. Ask them about a time when they gained proficiency in something complicated and what they found most impactful to their mastery of the topic. Grit and drive easily overcome a deficit in a niche area of expertise, especially when someone has proven their technical know-how in an adjacent sector or technical discipline.
Be as responsive (and transparent) as you want them to be.
Your behavior during the hiring process is your first opportunity to show potential hires how your organization operates and what you expect of them. We often say to treat prospective employees the same way you would treat prospective clients. This is especially true for how quickly you respond to messages.
“I found an individual who would be perfect for a role and reached out to her in October on LinkedIn,” Jose tells me. “It was December by the time she responded, saying she was interested in learning more. I wrote her back within minutes to set up a meeting. From there, the process went quickly, and today she’s a successful customer success manager with one of my clients. You have to be on it. The moment someone talks to you, you have to be excited.”
Top sales professionals are excited about excelling in their field, and they want an employer to be excited to have them. They also want transparency in the hiring process. When prospective clients go through the buying process, you don’t halt communication when waiting for the deal to get through legal or procurement—you maintain regular, frequent touchpoints. Do the same for prospective hires. Maybe a new release has you unavailable for interviews for a few weeks. Communicate this information to candidates.
Timing is everything.
Jose’s story of having to wait a few months to hear from a high-quality candidate is a great example of the role timing plays in successfully finding and placing someone. “Many of the people I find are not initially actively looking for a new position,” says Jose. “If I reach out at the end of a quarter, I usually don’t hear back right away because salespeople are focused on ending the quarter strong. It’s my job to meet them as soon as they are ready.” Which brings us to our next insight…
Patience is a virtue.
It’s hard to be patient when you’re filling a revenue role in your organization. Especially when you’re doing it yourself—it’s taking time away from your actual job. We all suffer from the sunk cost fallacy. When you put in a lot of time reviewing resumes, interviewing, and watching presentations, you’re more likely to convince yourself that a not-quite-right candidate will work.
“To find the right people, you need to be patient and be willing to think outside the box,” Jose shares. “You have to be meticulous about what your needs are. It might be four to six weeks before you start getting the candidates you’re looking for. I always tell people to give themselves a three-month runway for hiring.”
It’s an iterative process.
You can’t simply write your job description and be done. “I’m constantly iterating and updating criteria throughout the search,” says Jose. “It’s like I’m a real estate agent, but I’m finding the right person instead of the right house. Every day, I’m going through listings, seeing what’s available, and also speaking to my client and getting a clearer picture of what they’re looking for. They don’t want to walk through 20 homes—they don’t have time for that. I iterate and hone my search until I find two or three I know are perfect for them.”
Tools can be helpful if you know how to use them.
Jose uses three different platforms as he winnows down his lists of candidates. “I have found some solutions that are incredibly useful,” he says. “I use Juicebox, ContextIQ, and BoodleBox every day. I’ve put them all together and constructed a workflow that’s efficient and effective.”
He starts with a list of thousands and uses these tools to review candidates on specific criteria, iterates, narrows the list, goes through profiles, finds which individuals he wants to reach out to, crafts messages, creates the right intake questions, responds to messages, conducts intake interviews, evaluates intake interviews, and then does it all again. All day. Every day. Which brings us to our final recruitment insight…
Recruitment is a lot of work.
If you’d like some help recruiting your next stellar sales professional, reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co.