If you want your real estate brokerage to grow and succeed, then one of your priorities should be talent acquisition. With the best of the best agents and real estate professionals in your team, you can boost profits, reduce hiring costs, and cultivate a positive company culture.
The problem is that real estate recruiting can be quite a challenging task, particularly when it comes to attracting and engaging the right candidates. What’s more, there’s no clear-cut way to ensure that what you’re doing is “right.” Depending on factors such as the location and the candidate’s level of experience, you need to make adjustments to your recruiting strategy.
Nevertheless, there are still certain elements that absolutely have to be present in your strategy to ensure that you can always find top talent. The Listing Real Estate Management provides just a few of them:
A Set of Recruiting Tools
If you think of real estate recruiting as a battle, then your recruiting tools are your weapons. Thus, to ensure success, you need to invest in tools that can streamline the process and automate tasks. Some of the most important ones include an applicant tracking system and a CRM like Brokerkit. These can help you manage leads and establish rapport, not to mention cultivate a healthy professional network. Brokerkit can also help you automate email drip campaigns, among other tasks, which allows your team to focus on other facets of recruitment (e.g., sourcing).
Other recruiting tools you might want to consider are video conferencing apps, task managers, and visual design platforms. Apps that let you scan and sign documents using a smartphone are also valuable for recruiters who are always on the go.
An Updated Careers Page
Whenever someone visits your website’s career page (whether they’re actively looking for a job or not), they expect to find relevant and updated information. The most important ones, obviously, are the open roles and their requirements. Aside from these, you may also want to include featured content about your company culture and some of the perks that your employees enjoy. These can go a long way in convincing talented agents to join your team.
Consider touching upon your brokerage’s mission and vision, too, even if you may already have it on your “About Us” page. There are people who want to know if they share the same values as a potential employer; by including your mission and vision on the careers page, it will be easier for candidates to personally assess if they’re a good fit.
Another good reason to update your careers page? Other brokerages are definitely doing it. In short, if you don’t regularly update your website’s career page, you’ll get left behind by your competitors. If you currently don’t have vacancies, you can still upload content such as job application tips or testimonials from your employees.
A Well-Structured Recruiting Team
You won’t be able to recruit good real estate agents if your recruiting team isn’t equally good. One way to ensure this is to build a team with a varied skill set; if everyone is good at interviewing, who will source viable candidates in the first place?
Some skills you may want to focus on are communication skills, marketing and sales, attention to detail, as well as tech-savviness. You also need to have a diverse team in terms of experience level. Senior recruiters with more real estate industry knowledge are better-equipped to identify and handle top talent; meanwhile, junior recruiters can handle entry-level positions and help filter candidates in the early stages.
An Optimized Social Media Presence
Did you know that social sites have been in existence since the late 1980s? However, it was only in the early 2000s when they reached mainstream popularity. The turning point was in 2004, when MySpace became the first platform to reach one million monthly active users and shaped the current landscape of social media.
All of this is to say that social media recruiting is still going strong. Do your research and study the sites in which real estate professionals are most active. Then, optimize your profiles and curate your posts to appeal to these people. Your social media accounts are also good avenues to cultivate relationships with passive candidates, who may eventually be convinced to join your brokerage through relevant, persuasive content.
A Smooth, Pleasant Candidate Experience
Whether you like it or not, the recruitment process can serve as a reflection of how employment would be like. Thus, if you want to succeed in finding the best people for your brokerage, you need to ensure that they have the smoothest, most pleasant recruitment experience—whether or not they eventually get hired.
You can start by creating a detailed, accurate job ad. Make an effort to personalize your messages to each applicant, particularly if they’re someone you’re really keen on hiring. Do your research about each candidate, and make sure to respond to inquiries on time. Lastly, don’t leave people hanging. Keep them updated about the progress of their application to let them know right away about the results.
These things might seem basic, but you’ll be surprised at how many real estate recruiters and brokerages miss out on them. Keep these in mind and implement them to increase the success rates of your recruitment strategy!
