7 Ways to Improve Your Real Estate Recruitment

Real estate agencies often struggle to recruit top talent for their organizations, but the talent is what separates the best firms from the rest. The best way for a broker to recruit real estate agents is to understand the obstacles that get in the way of the process of hiring new agents. These obstacles for how to recruit good real estate agents can include not leveraging the right technology or CRM. It can also include not taking advantage of online resources like Facebook and LinkedIn. Learning to identify and address the top challenges for real estate recruitment in your agency or real estate brokerage is the first step in beating the competition.

Once you know which challenges stand in your way for how to recruit top producing real estate agents, you can begin implementing best practices for finding the best agents. This includes everything from communicating your value proposition and company culture to leveraging current agents to tap into their network. One of the best methods for recruiting real estate agents is establishing strong brand recognition and an engaging online presence to connect with real estate industry professionals. Each new employee you bring onto the team is joining a group of top real estate agents. Showcase what makes your brokerage great and start honing your recruiting strategy and tactics on how to recruit real estate agents. 

Common Challenges for Real Estate Recruitment and Recruiting Real Estate Agents

Let’s start by looking at some of the common challenges for real estate recruiting that stand in the way of how to recruit the best real estate agents and new talent:

• Agent discovery. Finding the best agents worth hiring is a major obstacle, and the first one most agencies face as part of a recruitment real estate strategy. When thinking about the best way to recruit new real estate agents, you’ll need some sort of platform to find new candidates—like Facebook or LinkedIn. You’ll want a CRM to keep track of all the employee information and leads from real estate broker recruiting ads. Lastly, you’ll want to evaluate what the best agents could offer your agency. Most agencies attempt to address this by choosing better marketing channels or using a better recruitment platform. These platforms are great if you’re trying to solve the problem of how to recruit more real estate agents.
• Timing and replacement. Agencies function most efficiently when they always have a full team of available agents. But what happens when an agent quits? Most agencies scramble to find a replacement as quickly as possible, which is not the ideal approach to real estate recruitment. You want to avoid finding yourself reliant on a recruitment agency for real estate talent, so you’ll need to hone your tactics on how to recruit real estate agents. Even with ample time, timing new hires for recruitment real estate can be challenging. You can make a list of top 10 ways to recruit real estate agents, but if you do not have time to execute it will only be so effective.
• Differentiation. There are thousands of real estate recruitment agencies and brokers out there, and many of them will be in direct competition with you to find and recruit the best talent in the industry. If you don’t have a way to stand out from the crowd as part of your marketing plan for recruit real estate agents, candidates won’t have a reason to choose you over your competitors. In thinking about how to recruit the best real estate agents, think about what makes your brokerage the best and incorporate that into your best practices for recruiting real estate agents. 
• Hours spent. You might have a solid process for recruiting new real estate agents, but how long does it take for you to go through the motions? If you spend too many hours on real estate recruiting, the end result won’t be cost-efficient. Recruitment agencies real estate agent approach will always prioritize efficiency.
• Retention. You may be able to hire talented agents or know the best methods for recruiting real estate agents, but can you keep them around? The cost of hiring and onboarding new agents is high, so you’re much better off keeping the ones you have instead of always being on the lookout for new ones. This needs to be part of your best practices for recruiting real estate agents. A strategy for how to recruit and retain real estate agents has to emphasize both aspects. If your goal is how to recruit more real estate agents, you have to consider retention as well.

7 Ways to Improve Your Real Estate Recruitment 

If you’re left wondering how to recruit good real estate agents—you’re not alone. Deciding the best way to recruit new real estate agents is a big decision for any brokerage. Fortunately, there are several strategies that can help you overcome these recruitment real estate challenges, and be more successful in recruiting and retaining great agents.

Always keep recruiting new talent

One of the biggest challenges for real estate recruiters and real estate recruitment agencies is scrambling at the last minute to find an ideal candidate for an agent who has left. You can easily compensate for this problem by adopting an always-recruiting approach—this is one of the best methods for recruiting real estate agents. The best way for a broker to recruit real estate agents is to recruit consistently. The basic idea is to always keep an eye out for new and promising agents, keeping them in various stages of the recruiting process until you’re ready to fully hire them. This is what recruitment agencies real estate specialists do and you can for your business as well. It can be a little difficult to juggle many leads, but with the right platform and a few well-placed real estate broker recruiting ads, you can manage an enormous pipeline for real estate agent recruitment with relative ease.

Incentivize referrals

Across many industries, employee referrals remain the most popular source for hiring. The world of real estate recruitment agency hiring is no exception—and for good reason. Roughly 72 percent of interviews and 65 percent of external hires come as a result of referrals by employees. Referrals are easy to get, requiring no investment in advertising, and tend to produce higher-quality candidates, making them one of the best ways to recruit real estate agents. Since your employees will serve as a kind of the first-layer screen for your real estate firm or branch office, you can be confident in how to recruit good real estate agents. By leveraging your existing pool of agents, you can solve the problem of how to recruit more real estate agents.

Focus on your company culture

It’s tough to differentiate your agency from others as part of your tactics on how to recruit real estate agents, because the nature of the work is often the same, and your pay is likely competitive. You can’t offer much more money without jeopardizing your profitability, and you may not have wiggle room to change agent responsibilities. You can distinguish yourself with qualified candidates in your marketing plan for recruit real estate agents by focusing on your workplace culture, however. In considering how to recruit and retain real estate agents, think about what makes your brokerage special and how to share that information. Your social media accounts are a great place to post content from events with your team members to show what your culture is like to prospects. This can serve as unofficial real estate broker recruiting ads. What is it that makes your brokerage or agency different from those of your competitors? What kind of atmosphere can agents expect? Highlighting this information is one of the best practices for recruiting real estate agents. 

Think of your top 10 ways to recruit real estate agents and put it to work in your recruitment marketing.

Break the formula for recruiting real estate agents

Try experimenting with approaches that break the mold of common knowledge and traditional recruitment strategies when thinking about how to recruit top producing real estate agents. If you rely on a basic script or a template for your job description, you’re going to look like every other agency out there and get lumped in with various recruitment agency for real estate recruiters. You aren’t going to attract the attention of top talent and new real estate agents. Tinker with the headlines of your job ads, your placement strategy, and other variables to see if you can get better results and discover the best ways to recruit real estate agents.

Choose your marketing channels and resources wisely

There are many marketing and advertising channels you could use for your real estate recruitment, including inbound and outbound options. Consider these options carefully; you may be tempted to blast your job openings on as many channels as possible. This is likely not how to recruit top producing real estate agents. It’s usually better to focus on quality rather than quantity. Evaluate your advertising sources based on cost, effectiveness, and appeal to your target demographics and favor channels with the best all-around benefits. What’s the best advertising to recruit real estate agents? Investing in some brand-building initiatives for your online presence will be especially important to get name recognition for independent brokerages or if you are just starting to build your market share. The best way to recruit new real estate agents is to smartly get your name out there.

Keep tabs on employee satisfaction

Your real estate agent recruitment strategy won’t mean much if you have a high turnover rate. Even the best recruitment agencies real estate specialists can only help so much in this case. The best real estate recruitment strategies and real estate recruitment agencies also pay attention to building relationships with your own agents and their long-term employee satisfaction. How easy is it for your agents to integrate into your workplace culture? How happy are they with their position? How can you improve workplace conditions in the future? It’s almost always cheaper to keep a talented agent than to try and find a new one, so it should be your top priority.

Get Brokerkit

Everything gets easier when you have the right tech tools or CRM to improve your productivity (and your results). One of the best tools available for real estate recruitment is Brokerkit, an intuitive recruiting platform designed for real estate brokers and teams to help you efficiently hire the right people. Brokerkit does the work of a real estate recruitment agency with the ease of a seamless software tool. With it, you can keep track of every lead, manage your follow-ups, coordinate with your fellow recruiters, and onboard your new agents in a streamlined, easy-to-learn process. Brokerkit has been used to recruit more than 200 new agents in a single year and is adding new clients all the time. For a free Brokerkit demo, sign-up here.

 Bonus tip – Recruit agents with different experience levels

Casting the net wide is a good strategy for recruiting real estate agents and real estate recruitment agencies. You certainly want to go after heavy hitters, but so will every other real estate business in town. It will also take longer to convince a top producer to switch firms. Targeting new agents for your real estate team and those who are consistent performers, even though they may not be in tip top tier, is one of the best ways to recruit real estate agents. It’s important to recognize agents who just got their licenses vs ones that have been selling homes for 30 years will probably care about different things when considering where to work. You will need to vary your approach depending on an agent’s experience level to get the best candidates. Experienced agents may be more focused on the technology and marketing tools your real estate company can offer them. New millennial agents may care more about a place they can grow and whether or not you have fun company outings as well as your lead generation capabilities to get them started. Wondering what’s the best advertising to recruit real estate agents? It depends on who you’re looking to hire. 

Bonus tip – Invest in a mentor/buddy program 

The real estate industry is a tough business. Assigning new agents a mentor will go a long way in keeping them at your firm and is great way to answer the question of how to recruit the best real estate agents. Experienced agents do not need the same kind of help but it’s beneficial to assign them a buddy. Everyone appreciates a friendly face at team meetings and someone they can call with questions. It’s the type of program that can differentiate your firm from the offers of a recruitment agency for real estate. 

Bonus tip – Measure your real estate recruitment results

Any smart agent measures her results. Whether it’s marketing campaigns to prospective sellers or following up with potential buyers. Recruiting real estate agents is no different. You need to be able to identify whether or not what you are doing is working in your recruitment process and marketing plan for recruit real estate agents. You may have a top 10 ways to recruit real estate agents list, but if it’s not yielding results you need to shift gears. An example of a key metric is to get a goal and track how many phone calls you are making per day.

Bonus tip – Make it about more than money

Compensation will come up, but it is only one factor of the equation for agents trying to steer the direction of their real estate careers. It’s important for many people to work somewhere that has values similar to their own. A cultural fit is also critical for both parties and especially if you are a new brokerage. Leading your real estate recruitment efforts with a conversation on commission splits is more than likely a losing strategy.

Bonus tip – Try a happy hour

It’s easy to get lost in the daily business of winning clients and closing transactions. You need to be deliberate about your real estate agent recruitment and take it just as seriously to get the best candidates. Keeping agents and candidates engaged is how to recruit and retain real estate agents. What’s the best advertising to recruit real estate agents? Letting prospects see you and your team in action working hard, engaging with the community, and having some fun. Hosting a quarterly or monthly recruiting happy hour keeps it on everyone’s radar as an important activity. It also provides an opportunity to socialize with prospective recruits outside the office.

Final Thoughts for Recruiting Top Prospects

If you’re ready to recruit agents in your area, you’ll need the best possible tools to help you get the job done. Remember, you’re competing against both other brokerages and real estate recruitment agency recruiters. The best way for a broker to recruit real estate agents is to have a comprehensive strategy in place. Brokerkit’s real estate recruiting module is the top platform on the market. Sign up for a free demo to learn how Brokerkit can help jump-start your recruiting efforts today!