What Is Your Real Estate Recruiting Missing?

As a broker, you want to ensure that your brokerage is constantly growing, evolving, and increasing its profits. In order to accomplish these long term goals, you must engage in competitive and creative real estate recruiting tactics. This will draw the best agents, with the most potential to your brokerage. A comprehensive real estate recruitment company initiative allows your business to quickly develop into the best and most productive organization it has the capacity to be. 

Culture Schmultur

I know you’ve heard it time and time again. Not to be compared to a broken record, but having an amazing company culture that offers support for agents, and pathways for growth, is essential. Especially when attempting to recruit the best and brightest the real estate industry has to offer. Maybe your brokerage already has a cohesive company culture that any agent would be proud to be apart of. Yet, you must be able to market it effectively, in order for your brokerage to catch the attention of agents. One of the best ways to recruit real estate agents includes adopting online and in-person real estate recruiting methods. Utilize both methods, and have a set plan in place for each to ensure that you are always presenting your best foot forward to new agents, especially when recruiting millennial real estate agents. 

Culture Spelled Out

Definition: a clear picture and understanding of your brokerage’s goals, values, expectations, and sense of community. Establishing the culture and atmosphere of your brokerage is the first step in creating an effective agent recruitment campaign or a real estate recruiting presentation. Accomplished agents of today’s real estate industry, will not even consider your brokerage as a potential place to work without this.

Studies have shown that a positive company culture with strong values is exponentially rising on professionals’ “must-have” list. Making it is obvious that establishing a strong company culture should be the very first thing you consider when attempting to construct your agent recruitment plan. The culture present in your brokerage should be the center selling point of your real estate recruiting plan. It’s your basic building block that everything else is based on. 

This Little Brokerage of Mine, I’m Gonna Let it Shine

As stated previously, your company culture consists of the goals, values, expectations, and sense of community that you have developed within your brokerage. Now, in order to successfully market these elements of your brokerage to new agents, you must clearly illustrate how they are different from every other brokerage agents are considering joining.

For example

Maybe you host a brokerage picnic every spring to develop the community feel. Maybe your brokerage assists agents in traveling to a real estate convention showing a focus on continued education and support of agents. The specific and unique programs, events, and bonding exercises that you have implemented into your brokerage should shine in your real estate recruiting campaign. Advertising these specific elements of your brokerage will attract agents from all over. They will be able to truly picture themselves in an inviting, positive, and supportive environment. Which, after all, is what every professional is looking for in today’s job market. Among the best ways to recruit real estate agents, is to show prospective candidates the heart of your business.  

The Competition

Competing with massive brokerages that are able to offer widespread incentives for joining, is more than difficult at times. It can also be challenging is you’re stacked up against a real estate recruitment company. That is why putting such an emphasis on the community and culture of your smaller brokerage is vastly important. It is the upper hand you have over large nationwide brokerages. Big Box brokerages are simply just too large to put an extensive focus on each individual agent. Get to know each agent personally. Learn their strengths and weaknesses, and overall, value them as an individual. Show agents that your brokerage has the ability, and culture in place to effectively do that, and you will never have a problem with agent recruitment again. 

Education Opportunities 

Real estate agents are very driven people and constantly aspire to better themselves in their careers. This makes one of the best ways to recruit real estate agents to highlight any continued education opportunities your brokerage may offer. There are countless ways to offer education opportunities when you are a recruitment broker, so don’t only think of formal outlets.

Ladies Who Lunch

Let’s say every other Friday your brokerage has a company-wide lunch meeting. The brokerage buys everyone lunch, and everyone gets together in the conference room to enjoy lunch and listen to a presentation. It could be on the newest real estate technology or the best new negotiation tactic. This is a great example of a positive, and social company culture, as well as an amazing example of informal education opportunities for agents. Making events or programs similar to that example are perfect to include, or highlight, in your agent recruitment campaign and real estate recruiting presentation.

You can also easily offer more formal education opportunities. These classically sought after opportunities are bound to attract agents from all generations to your brokerage. There are countless real estate continued education courses online, produced by various sources and for various price amounts. Provide incentives to agents to complete them. Offer a program that helps cover their costs, or create one yourself that you believe would be beneficial to agents. Continued education is a must when it comes to attempting to grow into the most profitable agent one aspires to be. Show that your brokerage values, and puts an emphasis on, continued education.

Tech Check

Extensive knowledge and use of technology in day to day business operations have become a requirement for agents when considering joining a new brokerage. This will be especially important if you are trying to recruit younger millennial agents to your brokerage. Technology is becoming the backbone of our world today. Along with that, the backbone of many professional industries as well. Real estate is a prime example of this. There are countless technology programs and platforms that make the real estate experience more efficient, enjoyable, safer, and easier for real estate agents and clients alike. It is absolutely essential to invest in these technologies, and the education required, in order to use them to their fullest potential. 

Technology can not only be used as a selling point as part of your real estate recruitment company initiative but also as an effective real estate recruiting tool for recruitment broker. Brokerkit is a program that allows you to easily track and implement agent recruiting and retention strategies. It allows you to simplify your agent recruiting campaign by doing a lot of the tedious work for you and it puts all the tools you need for agent recruitment in one convenient place. Brokerkit is compatible with and able to integrate into, GSuite (Gmail, Google Calendar) or Microsoft (Office365,outlook.com,hotmail.com) accounts. Check your availability in order to schedule an interview, and email the potential candidate about their interview time, without ever leaving the platform.

The program also lets you perform tasks such as tracking conversations with potential employees, and managing your team roster. This is a perfect technological tool for any brokerage, or real estate team. When it is implemented in your business, it will be sure to show you positive results in no time. 

Mentor (Not Mento, The Fresh Maker)

Mentoring is another strong selling point for any brokerage. Similar to continued education opportunities, mentoring offers a path to growth and betterment for new agents. Every real estate agent has the goal to become the most profitable and successful agent they have the ability to be. Why else enter the industry? Mentoring can come from an agent pairing program, or from you. Being able to offer a stable mentor that values, supports, and offers in-person real-time guidance to an agent is invaluable. While newer real estate agents lack experience, they are often very driven and excited about the prospect of improving as an agent. Attracting teachable and motivated new agents to your brokerage will only sustain your brokerage in the long term. Invite a new, and fresh perspective into your business. 

Online Real Estate Recruiting

You have thought through and solidified your message. It is time to actually implement your real estate recruiting campaign for recruiting millennial real estate agents. Due to the nature of agent recruiting, the majority of your recruitment campaign will be done online. This makes it important that you are fully utilizing multiple online outreach methods, in order to have the greatest and most diverse agent reach possible. This will ensure that you, a recruitment broker, have options when it comes to hiring a new agent and that you will have the ability to be selective and hire a new agent that fits well into your current brokerage culture. 

Social Butterflies

Social media platforms include sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin. It is important to realize that these innovative sites may single-handedly be the most influential, and impacting agent recruiting tool to date. Social media platforms are:

• free to join
• almost everyone connected to society is present on them in some way
• they offer the ability to join groups of people that all share your interest or profession
• they give you the ability to continuously post agent recruitment material

These attributes and advantages of social media are more than appealing. Dedicate substantial time and effort into the effective use of them. You can post:

• infographics about your company culture
• promote a blog post one of your agents wrote
• post about the listings that your agents are currently representing
• re-post important news or advances in the real estate industry
• Outright post recruitment material

Agents in today’s job market will also hold the expectation that you, your agents, and your brokerage be consistent, put together, and positive presence on multiple social media platforms. This has only recently become an expectation of job candidates, especially real estate agents, but it is still of very high priority and importance to them. Having an exceptional presence on social media is something your brokerage should always be striving for, and the fact it can also be used for agent recruitment is just an added benefit of these amazing platforms.

Video Marketing 

Video marketing is a new trend, that has proven to be very popular with agents, and clients. There are many technology platforms available to help you create videos, and then send them to agents or client email lists, as well as post them to social media. This is just one reason why utilizing video is such a great method. You can use it to creatively communicate with your current agents, potential new ones, or clients alike. You can send company morning updates or the highlights from the weekly Friday meeting to your current agents over a fun and concise video (instead of ANOTHER email). Or, you use it to create an introduction video where you video each of your current agents saying their name and a fun fact about themselves. 

Videos like that can easily be used as marketing material to promote on social media for potential new agents to see, or you could send the video in a marketing email drip to them instead. The use of video allows you to successfully grab agents’ attention and keep it for the duration of the video. While the use of short videos is relatively new in the real estate industry, it seems to be a trend that is only growing in success and popularity.

Online Correspondence Diagram

Okay fine, it’s just a fancy word for email templates. Utilizing email drips and templates is a classic online recruiting method. There are a few tips though that can greatly improve the success rate of this classic method. First, start with a subject line that grabs an agent’s attention. Real estate agents receive countless nonsense promotional emails that they never even open. Make sure your subject line intrigues them enough to open the email in the first place. Once you’ve got a high open rate of your emails, you’ve succeeded in the hardest part of using email in your real estate recruiting. There is always more you can do to improve upon your response rates though.

I Am Not A Robot

Be personal. Ensure that you use the name of each agent you are reaching out to in their respective email. It is also a good idea to include a fact or two about them, such as where they currently work, to show you did some research on them and that you actually care about them as an individual. Instead of going into all the numbers about how you can make them more money, address your value proposition (that would be your company culture and everything that is included with it). State why your brokerage is unique. Why is working at your brokerage a better experience for them than where they currently work?

It is vital to make the call to action. Ask to talk in-person or over the phone. You can only hold someone’s attention in an email for so long. To have the time to make the full pitch about your brokerage, you will need to actually speak with them. Speaking in person also gives you and the potential new agent a chance to get to know each other better and establish a connection. Allowing you to determine if they would actually be a good fit in your brokerage. 

In-Person Recruiting 

While it is true that the majority of your agent recruitment campaign will take place online, the importance of in-person communication with potential agents should not be forgotten or overlooked. Often times in an in-person meeting when sharing your real estate recruiting presentation, the agent is evaluating you and your brokerage first hand. This is the deciding factor for many agents who are thinking of joining your brokerage. Your online appearance and recruitment strategies may be perfect, but if you can not match that level of success in your actual brokerage, you will never reach your full agent recruitment potential. 

Put Your Culture Where Your Mouth Is

It is not enough to simply boast about it online, you must give potential agents an opportunity to witness, and be apart of it first hand. In order to do this, host a happy hour when you are recruiting millennial real estate agents. You do it at the office or off-site after hours. Invite all of the agents that currently work in your brokerage, along with anyone who is interested in joining your brokerage. Advertise the event on social media, and make it an appealing event that your current agents will enjoy.

When potential agents come to the event, they will be able to see how all of your current agents interact. It gives them a good example of the culture that truly exists in your brokerage. An event like this creates a stress-free environment, where potential new agents feel comfortable talking to you, and your current agents. It allows them to make memorable, positive, and personal connections. The more positive connections a potential new agent makes at an in-person meeting, the more likely they will be to highly consider joining your brokerage. 

Cream Of The Crop 

1. Solidify your message and company culture
2. Utilize multiple online recruitment methods
3. Do not forget about the utmost importance of in-person recruiting
4. Fame is in the follow up Get your Demo

Take these steps and you will be on track to greatly improve your real estate recruiting. Real estate recruiting takes a long term commitment to a plan, the adoption of innovative new strategies, and true dedication. It is difficult at the beginning of every brokerage to revamp their recruitment plan. Taking steps in the right direction will allow you to attract the best agents to your brokerage, and in the long run, increase your revenue, ensuring the sustainability of your brokerage.