Use the Shackleton Sales Recruitment Process
Why your best candidates keep quitting before Q2 (and what a 100 year old explorer's ad can teach you about fixing it)
(Image: Nasjonalbiblioteket from Norway, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton supposedly placed this ad to recruit for his Antarctic expedition:
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”
Legend says he was flooded with applicants.
Whether the ad is real or apocryphal, the lesson behind it is bulletproof. Shackleton didn’t sell the dream. He sold the reality. And the people who showed up were genuinely ready for what was coming.
Now compare that to how most companies recruit salespeople.
The job posting says: “Dynamic, fast-paced environment. Unlimited earning potential. Join our winning team!”
What actually happens: Your first three months will feel like shouting into the void. You’ll hear “no” 47 times before your first “yes.” Your pipeline will be empty more often than it’s full. And some weeks, you’ll question every career decision you’ve ever made.
We don’t say that part out loud. And then we act shocked when people quit before the end of Q1.
Here’s what I’ve seen happen over and over again.
A company hires a salesperson. The interview is all sizzle. The product is amazing, the market is huge, the comp plan is generous. The candidate is excited. Everyone shakes hands.
Ninety days later, the new hire is gone. Not because they couldn’t sell, but because nobody told them what selling here actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon when the CRM is empty and the phone isn’t ringing.
The hiring manager painted a picture of a Ferrari. The new hire showed up and found a go-kart. A perfectly good go-kart that another seller might have liked, but absolutely not what they were expecting when they accepted the offer.
And this keeps happening because the recruiting process itself is broken. Companies treat the interview like a sales pitch when it should be a Shackleton ad.
So here’s my challenge to anyone hiring salespeople right now: write your own Shackleton ad.
Not literally. But before your next interview, sit down and write the brutally honest version of the job. The one you’d never post on LinkedIn. The version that makes you slightly uncomfortable reading it back to yourself.
Something like:
“You will spend 80% of your time prospecting. Our brand is not well known yet, and nobody is coming inbound begging to buy. You’ll need to build your own pipeline from scratch. The product is good but still evolving, so you’ll occasionally sell something that doesn’t fully exist yet and then work with the team to make it real. Your first deal will probably take 60 to 90 days. If you need a base salary to feel safe, this probably won’t work for you. If you thrive on building something from nothing, keep reading.”
Is that going to scare some people away? Absolutely. And that’s the entire point.
The best salespeople I’ve ever worked with didn’t want the easy gig. They wanted to understand what they were walking into. They wanted the truth so they could decide if THIS was the fight they wanted to take on.
When you’re honest about the hard parts in the interview, three things happen.
The wrong people remove themselves from the process. That saves you months of wasted salary, wasted training time, and wasted morale on both sides of the table.
The right people lean in harder. The ones who read your Shackleton ad and think “that sounds like exactly my kind of challenge” are the ones who will still be with you a year from now.
And trust gets built before they even start. You told them the truth. They showed up anyway. That is a fundamentally different starting point than discovering the truth three weeks in and feeling like they were sold a bill of goods.
I talk to founders and sales leaders every week who tell me their biggest problem is hiring. The churn is too high, ramp takes too long, and the culture fit keeps missing.
Almost every time, when I dig in, the root cause is the same: the interview sold a version of the job that doesn’t actually exist in the real world.
Stop selling the role and start describing it.
Describe the worst Tuesday. Describe the deal that fell apart at the last minute because legal got involved. Describe what the CRM looks like at 5pm on a Friday when nothing closed that week. Describe the parts of the job that make your current top performer want to throw their laptop out the window, and then describe why they stay anyway.
That last part, the reason your best people stay despite everything, is your actual value proposition. Not the comp plan. Not the snack wall. The real reason people stick around when things get hard.
Shackleton figured this out over 100 years ago. Specificity attracts the right people. Honesty filters out the wrong ones. And the best salespeople in the world don’t want to be sold on a role. They want to be trusted with the truth about it.
The next time you write a job description or sit down for a first round interview, ask yourself: am I being Shackleton, or am I being every other job posting on Indeed?
Your churn rate already knows the answer.
Dax is the Co-Founder & CEO @ FOMO.ai, and the author of 84Futures.com.