Three Key Factors for Successful Agent Recruiting

Traditional recruiting methods aren’t enough anymore, especially when it comes to recruitment of real estate sales agents. You need and want to find the right overall match for your company. Ability and past experiences are good, but equally important is their potential to thrive in your business environment.
A holistic approach is essential in today’s complex and rapidly-changing real estate environment. And a more fully integrated process will enable you to achieve profitable, long-term results.
1. USE TOOLS
• Find Them – Use the best tools available and create a process. Before you can market to prospective agents you have to find them. Use every avenue available to find prospects. In your market where are talented individuals looking for a rewarding real estate sales career? Savvy professionals are online, and social media can be a very effective means of inbound recruiting. Even your own agents can be valuable recruiters through their own Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, other social media outlets, or in-the-field exposure to other agents.
• Hire Them – Hiring is largely marketing. You want to attract the most promising prospects including experienced sales agents, but to close the sale you need to sell your company as the best workplace for their specific needs. Limiting your search or failing to promote your company as a great place to work could cause you to miss out on someone truly special. Marketing includes presenting your branding message on your company’s website, job board postings, social media postings, email signatures, career resource portals, and much more.
2. PLAN and USE A PROCESS
• Follow a process – Do you have a plan to stay in touch with prospects over time? What will you discuss with them? How will you become their broker of choice when they are ready to make a move? In effect, recruiting real estate agents is a matter of data management. Using all available tools to optimize the processes and streamlining your procedures will give you the most compelling results. Since you’re recruiting a “whole person,” base your plan on company goals and culture.
• Customize Recruiting Plan – Based on their interests and data gathered from pre-screening tools and specialized real estate sales assessments you can customize your recruiting plan to each individual’s needs. In addition, this data can provide the greatest insight regarding each candidate’s relevant abilities and likely successes.
• Hold Accountable – Following a plan and process and holding your team accountable on recruiting will ultimately save time for recruiters and avoid inadvertently overlooking great candidates.
3. MEASURE SUCCESS
• Every company defines “success” differently. Knowing which skills and personalities blend best within your real estate company will help uncover top quality sales agents. Systematically gather and analyze data, using key performance indicators and milestones achieved.
• Selecting poor performing sales agents is extremely costly. There are direct and indirect costs you should not ignore, such as your manager or recruiter time (that could have been spent on a better performing sales agent), training costs, etc. Relevant data and effective analysis help manage risk and significantly reduce these avoidable costs by more accurately predicting good choices.
• Focusing on selecting the best real estate salespeople will provide an immediate ROI, greatly improve retention, and build long-term success for your real estate company.
In summary, planning and following a structured recruiting process is fundamental to successful growing the number of sales agents in your brokerage. Your company has an important branding message, so follow a process that ensures that brand is promoted effectively. Ultimately you must hold your managers and recruiters accountable to ensure success in recruiting the number of agents necessary to reach your recruiting goal.
For more discussion or information on this topic and real estate agent recruiting, you are welcome to visit Real Estate Recruiting Solutions or feel free to contact Maria Mull, VP of Business Development, AlignMark at mmull@alignmark.com (919)436-6500.

Casting a Wider Recruiting Net

Real estate is changing from what many of us have known for a long time now.  It will be a long time before we see another market as we have had in the past, an easy career choice where one can make money with no effort.  Lazy agents are failing and experienced agents are happy the bottom feeders are exiting the business.  The revolving door is still moving but this time there are not a lot of incoming bodies.

Real Estate is still a very viable career path!  The media is making it sound all doom and gloom and unfortunately Real Estate companies did not plan for the lean times by training their agents to survive this type of economy when business was good.  No one planned for the famine, they only reaped the rewards of the feast and sadly they squandered their time, money and opportunity to put away for the lean times.  How many brokers have trained their agents to run their business as a business?  This is a whole other topic, maybe one for later.

What we do know is that no longer will real estate have an onslaught of new comers who get in the business and make hundreds of thousands of dollars without working for what they earn.  No longer will brokers be overrun with people wanting to get in the business.  Now brokers will have to learn to “fish” and cast a larger net to help them recruit more agents to the business.  They WILL have to position themselves as the broker of choice and help others understand their value proposition.

So here is my question, if you want to recruit and retain more agents, What makes you so special?  Answering this question will help you understand your value proposition.  No longer is it enough for a real estate company to boast about their training, their technology or size.  Small is the new large and big armies don’t always win the war.  

If you cannot clearly communicate what makes you so special then maybe it is time to reach out to someone or a company who can help you.  AlignMark has been helping companies for more than 30 years with their human capital investments.  Alignmark recently launched the latest Recruiting technology, AccuRecruiter, to help brokers reach more passive job candidates.  This new technology helps convert more leads into hires.  If you want to learn how a click, connect, converse and close can help you contact AlignMark for more details.