Andrew Evangelos (Director of Sales Engineering, North America at Everbridge) provides his perspective after hiring 2 graduates from PreSales Academy's Cohort #1.
What's been your experience hiring PreSales Academy Graduates?
Hiring from the Presales Academy helped us minimize the risk in bringing in new PreSales talent. This risk applies to both the job candidates and to the organization doing the hiring. Because PreSales requires the unique combination of skillsets, the program has let us give an opportunity to two amazing individuals that likely would not have had the opportunity to make the switch in careers. The gap to learn a new role, the technology and basic processes would be too great in many of those cases. The candidates we hired came into the role with a clear understanding of the expectations of PreSales, all we had to do was put them through our enablement program, like we would with an experienced Sales Engineer. Internally it helped us send a great message about the investment in people. When you are too heavy on the senior/experienced side of a PreSales role, you end up with limited career path opportunities. Bringing in new individuals has helped us define those career paths for ALL our employees.
Why hire junior or associate-level candidates?
Our interest in hiring at the junior-level was for several reasons. First, we were starting a SMB sales team that was focused on smaller accounts. We needed a scalable way to support those teams. Second, one of our goals was to establish a career progression in our organization. To do this, we had to stop hiring at the senior-level, leaving little room for growth in our organization. Third, I was hired as a Sales Engineer in this way. I know the reason that people are not in Sales Engineering is not a lack of skills, but often a lack of awareness of the role. This leaves all sorts of untapped talent available in other types of roles. I wanted to continue to share the career that I found with other individuals. And finally, the last piece is simply budget related. By hiring junior-level SE’s, we were able to hire an additional headcount relative to our preliminary budget. This helped us hit our targets for supporting our sales organization.
What has been your experience working with PreSales Academy?
Working with Yuji and team has been nothing short of great. We discussed our hiring needs and what traits in a candidate we considered our organizational best fit. I was given the opportunity to speak to the class of the candidates about myself and a little about my organization. As a result we were able to narrow down the pool of graduates to those that were interested in applying to Everbridge and those that best fit our requirements. Yuji and team did a great job prepping the graduates so that they were very well prepared for their interviews. Ultimately, we made offers to two candidates and thankfully they accepted. Both candidates that we hired have been with us about a year and are doing great! The only thing that I could improve would be my staffing budget so that I could hire more!
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Andrew Evangelos is Director of Sales Engineering, North America at Everbridge. He scaled a small team of a few Sales Engineers to an organization supporting a large Enterprise Sales Team as he helped Everbridge grow from a startup to a public company.