A guide to recruiting for brokerage owners and managers.
As a real estate owner or manager, you may feel a little stuck right now. Many of you put recruiting on hold over the last 6 months to focus attention on sustaining your offices during the Covid-19 crisis. While this was important work, the momentum you had previously built towards recruiting has likely stalled.
When an important business process like recruiting loses momentum, getting things moving again feels overwhelming. Here are a few tips to jumpstart recruiting in your office.
Claim Your Niche
Recruiting can make you feel paralyzed when you lack a clear vision of how to help agents in your marketplace. Start by asking yourself: What do I do better than anyone else?
A business strategist would call this focusing on a niche, and the same principle applies to recruiting. For example, your niche might be: I help languishing agents who’ve been in real estate less than two years transform themselves into full-time productive agents.
The real estate industry is too diverse and complex to be a generalist. The most effective hiring managers reduce the scope of who they’re trying to recruit and focus their attention on those who they can help the most.
Identify Your Ideal Prospect
Focusing on a specific niche is like choosing your sport; while identifying your ideal prospect is like selecting what type of players you want on your team. Recruiting is way too difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to skip this important step.
Start this process by inventorying the characteristics of your most successful agents. Consider things such as education, work history, track record as an agent, goals and aspirations, stage of career, character traits, and anything else that helps you categorize an individual who will thrive under your leadership.
Here is an example of an ideal recruiting prospect profile from a high-performing manager I coach:
My ideal recruiting prospect is an experienced agent doing 8-12 transactions/year who wants to build a sustainable business, double their personal income, and maintain a healthy work-life balance.
I’m best able to help agents who are goal-oriented, self-managed, and customer centric. Our systems and methodologies are best suited for those who have a collaborative, focused, and “farming” mindset. I personally enjoy helping those who are curious, coachable, and hungry.
Once you get a definitive vision of who you want to hire, the recruiting process becomes more focused and picks up speed.
Develop Your Unique Value Proposition
When a glove manufacturer makes a glove, they have a certain type of hand in mind. Recruiting should follow the same line of reasoning. Once you’ve created your ideal recruiting prospect profile, ask yourself: What can I offer this prospect that is so compelling they’d be foolish not to accept it?
At this juncture, it’s tempting to talk about the features and benefits you provide compared to your competitors. But this approach will fail to engage your prospect’s emotions or capture their imagination.
It’s better to address specific problems your ideal prospect may be experiencing. Here is the unique value proposition relating to the ideal prospect profile highlighted earlier:
You know how some agents start a real estate career, experience some initial success, but feel like demands of the business are so intense it would be impossible to grow and sustain more business?
I specialize in helping agents who are earning $30K-$40K/year in personal income efficiently scale their businesses to produce more than $80K/year in income within 24 months. This is accomplished through a unique combination of support services, time-saving tools, personal coaching, and group accountability.
I have multiple agents who’ve been through this process and are now selling more than 20 homes per year, have personal incomes above $80K/year, and have a reasonable work-life balance. I’ve helped them build businesses that are prosperous, sustainable, and support their personal goals.
An effective value proposition follows this pattern: Identify a common problem, explain your unique solution, and provide proof your solution works.
Regaining Momentum
Businesses of all types are recreating themselves and learning to compete under new conditions. By focusing on a narrow niche, getting clear on who you want to hire, and developing a compelling offer, you’re taking the first steps necessary to reopen recruiting in your office.
Ben Hess is a serial entrepreneur, writer, and coach who has helped hundreds of real estate companies, teams, and managers excel at recruiting. He is the co-founded CoRecruit, a coaching company that helps real estate leaders build better recruiting systems and first level excel at experienced agent recruiting.