When hiring for sales, keep an open mind

When it comes to hiring for sales, many hiring managers would prefer to hire from within the localization industry.

However, as an experienced staffing company in the localization industry, our belief is that if you can sell, you can sell, and many companies could benefit from people coming in from outside the industry.

Especially those with verticalized experienced, particularly from regulated industries like life sciences.

In his previous role as head of sales and marketing at SDL (acquired by RWS in November 2020), Massimo Ghislandi says that hiring managers should keep on open mind when it comes to finding the right talent.

“I’ve been on the receiving end of ‘Oh well, you don’t know this industry’ when I’ve been looking for jobs in the past,” he recalls.

“But as long as you have a good base, I think you can transfer it. I believe in transferable skills.”

“When you hire somebody from the industry, it can be quicker to train them. But by the same token, sometimes we have project managers that want to become salespeople and actually you do need to teach them quite a lot of sales skills.

“And sometimes we do have people come with a sales background and you do need to teach them about the localization industry.

“We rarely find people that come ready-made, especially in my part of the business which is translation software. So we have to be open-minded.”

As someone who came from outside the industry and now has more than 12 year’s experience in localization, Massimo has this advice for people thinking of moving into localization.

“Find a company that you feel like you can fit in,” he says.

“When we try to recruit, it is of course about the skills, but you also think, is this person going to like working here? Are we going to like this person?

“So it’s important to figure out whether the company you’re going for is going to have something that works for you.”

If you want to know more about this area, visit Lion People Global’s website where you can watch back our LT Talks series of videos where we have talked to some of the industry leaders in localization for their insights into the world of translation.