Stop Promoting and Start Attracting

The promotional techniques used in a simple sale feel inappropriate to a recruiting prospect.You would never say: If you sign by Friday, we will improve your split by 10%.But many hiring mangers do make the mistake of overfocusing on features and benefits during the early stages of a recruiting engagement.This feels promotional, and it repels.  The alternative is to harness the power of attraction, and there are several recruiting-related attraction principles you can quickly learn and implement.The first one is familiarity. People are attracted to those who seem familiar to them.Researchers at MIT have studied this topic and found those who are in close proximity and interact frequently tend to be attracted to each other.For real estate recruiting, the familiarity principle has several obvious applications.Be visible in your community. Most real estate companies have a physical presence in a community (offices, yard signage, wearing nametags, etc.). Maximize this exposure.Frequently connect with candidates. Seek out opportunities to make face-to-face connections and supplement these connections with social media activityUse a personal picture in your correspondence. You can’t meet with candidates face-to-face all the time, but you can “show your face” in various types of correspondence.Attractiveness is something built over time through a series of small purposeful actions.If it’s done right, your candidates won’t fully know what’s happening. They just know, for some reason, working with you seems like a good idea.