Recruiting real estate agents is a very challenging task. Not only is finding capable and skillful agents a major difficulty in the recruitment process, the time it takes to go through the motions of recruitment and the effort it takes to keep great agents around can also prove to be considerable challenges even for the most adept recruiters.
If you’re a real estate recruiter and you’re constantly finding yourself in a bind, don’t fret. In this quick and easy guide, we’ll fill you in on some real estate recruiting ideas that will help ease your struggle in terms of recruiting top talent for your brokerage firm. We’ll go through each one of them briefly.
Never Stop Recruiting
When recruiting real estate agents, it is advisable to adapt an “always-recruiting” mindset. This way, you’ll never have to scramble to find replacements for people who suddenly leave your firm, and you’re always developing talents who would be better prepared to take on bigger responsibilities in your organization. It can be difficult to keep track of all your leads, but with the right real estate recruiting software, you’ll be able to have better control of all stages of your recruitment process.
Provide Incentives for Referrals
According to some studies, nearly three-quarters of interviews and external hires are attributable to referrals made by companies’ existing employees. As such, it only makes perfect sense to incentivize referrals so that more of your employees will be better inclined to introduce your company to individuals who may be a good fit with your organization. Referrals don’t only cost next to nothing in terms of advertising, the referred individuals also tend to be candidates of higher quality because they’ve already been vetted by the people they know within your firm.
Personalize Your Recruitment Scripts
You can’t always put all candidates within a generalist box. If you’re relying on just one or two recruitment scripts, for example, and you’re using them to prospect individuals from across different locations, specialties, experience levels, and production values, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice. Consider varying your job ads, recruiting emails, and outreach strategies to determine if you could do things a little better.
Monitor Employee Satisfaction
Successfully winning over new real estate agents to your side won’t matter much if people are also leaving your firm at a consistent rate. As such, it’s important to focus as well on developing strategies for agent retention. Make sure to help your new recruits ease into your company culture, and pull out all the stops to ensure that they are trained and receive the support they need. Also keep tabs on how happy and fulfilling they feel about their current role and position. Moreover, it’s also important to probe what pain points they are currently experiencing and to determine what could be done to make workplace conditions better. Remember, it’s in the best interest of your bottom line to retain your recruits for as long as possible. It costs way less resources to keep your agents than to consistently find people who can replace them.
Make Use of the Right Technology
Your real estate agent recruitment process can be streamlined and made much more efficient when you have the right technological tools at your disposal. For example, an intuitive real estate recruitment software designed specifically for real estate brokers and teams can help you not just during the hiring process itself, it can also help you with agent coaching and retention. With such a software, you’ll be able to track your leads, manage your follow-ups, collaborate with other members of your team, and onboard new recruits through a rationalized, intelligible, and time-saving platform. You’ll be able to take advantage of useful software functionalities like contact management, document management, task management, transaction management, calendar appointments, and integrated email and SMS messaging, among other features.
Real estate agent recruitment comes with a host of challenges, from the difficulty of agent discovery and the overall length of the training process—all the way to the challenge of retaining the best people in your brokerage firm. However, with the right approach and the appropriate tools to back your process up, you’ll be in a much better position to bring your real estate agent recruitment game to the next level.
