A recruiter or hiring manager gives something to a prospect, and the prospect feels obligated to give something back to make things even.
 
As prospects work to pay off their miniature debts, savvy recruiters are persuading them to take small steps towards a desired objective.
 
For healthy recruiting prospects, this tactic is effective and advantageous to both parties.
 
But for high-maintenance prospects, it’s an exchange that will suck your time and energy away.
 
For these prospects, try using a quid pro quo approach.
 
Quid pro quo means you’re requiring payback for what you’re offering.
 
For example, if a new-agent prospect is being indecisive about joining your office, you might offer to reimburse their pre-licensing expenses.
 
This offer moves beyond reciprocity when you say: To get reimbursed, you must sign your paperwork by Friday.
 
You’re only going to provide your gift if they meet your timeline.
 
Using a quid pro quo approach is an effective tactic for those prospects who are dragging their feet, being difficult to please, or lacking clarity in their decisions.
 
It keeps you from being the reciprocity giver who never gets paid back.

Setting and meeting expectations are the cornerstones of most business successes.

When someone sets an expectation for you, how do you respond?

Do you…

Quickly accept the new objective and get to work?

Question the validity of the new goal before putting any effort towards it?

Need to know the source of the new expectation? Do I respect the person asking me to do this?

Wonder why we’re setting new objectives? Leave me alone and let me do my work.

According to best-selling author Gretchen Rubin, people respond to expectations differently.

Just because you readily accept new objections without much fuss, doesn’t mean everyone else around you will have the same tendency.

Some hiring managers focus their attention on prospects who have similar tendencies and screen out those who display differences.

By doing so, they may be missing out on some very talented individuals.

Rather than focusing on how a person responds to expectations, find out if they have a track record of meeting expectations once they’re agreed upon.

Don’t fall into the “I hire people like me” trap. You’re great, but other people are great too.

To be successful, a real estate manager must proactively make decisions on where to spend their time and effort.

Most decisions boil down to two options:

Solve short-term problems. This includes resolving disputes, deal-doctoring, and the overabundance of other things needed to keep an office running smoothly.

Invest in opportunities to build the future. This includes activities to find, retain, and make better agents.

It’s unreasonable to assume you can spend all your time investing in future-building activities.

Of course, problems need to be solved. But effective managers put tight boundaries on their problem-solving activities.

How? Here are some ideas to keep problem-solving from stealing your effectiveness.

Question. Before jumping in to help, ask yourself: What would happen if I didn’t get involved?

Delay. Can your involvement be delayed for a day or two? What’s delayed often goes undone, and that can be a good thing.

Repair. What clamors for your attention is often a symptom of a broken system or process. If you’re going to spend time fixing, always ask: What needs to change so this doesn’t happen again?

There will always be a tension between problem-solving and investing.

Effective managers learn to ignore the siren’s call to problem-solve and spend most of their time investing.

Earlier this week, I introduced you to virtual and hybrid culture expert Bryan Mills.

Bryan led a fully virtual staffing company for more than a decade.

One of his secrets of success is maintaining a lively connection between his virtual employees and the values of the company.

He hires for values, but that’s not enough. He also spends time and energy making sure the connection to those values does not wane.

How? He quizzes them on a periodic basis.

Every single one of our employees gets a call at least once a year testing them on our company’s values.

It goes like this: Pop quiz! What are our values?

The goal is that every employee knows our values by heart.

Also, we want them to be able to talk about at least one area in the company where they see our values in action.

Agents feel connected to your culture by what they believe about themselves, what they believe about your organization, and what they believe about you as a leader.

Regardless of how you’ve chosen to operate your office or team, this is the foundation for everything else you do, and it’s critical you get this right.

As Doug Conant once said: To win the marketplace, you must first win the workplace.

In this week’s podcast, we’ll be connecting with one of the best real estate recruiters in the country. 

Gina Verbanac is the Director of Corporate Recruiting for Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices The Preferred Realty & Stouffer Realty.

Gina’s company is the second largest independently owned Berkshire Hathaway franchise in the United States, and they were recently named the 27th largest real estate brokerage in the country by Real Trends. 

They have more than 2000 agents in 59 offices that are spread across western Pennsylvania and northwest Ohio.

Gina’s story is inspiring because it shows what high energy, a positive attitude, and a relentless focus on metrics can do for your recruiting results. 

Let’s see if you can keep up with Gina…

🍿Watch Now    | 🎧Listen Later  Apple Podcasts or  Spotify

The workforce at large and most real estate companies are struggling to make sense of company culture right now. 

Whether you’re fully virtual, made the transition back to a traditional office setting, or somewhere in between, your company culture has changed a lot over the last two years.

If you haven’t done so already, it’s a good time to assess the health of your culture and make plans to stregthen it in months ahead.

Here’s someone who can help you get started.

Bryan Miles, CEO of a virtual staffing company called Belay, has been helping companies with virtual and hybrid cultures for the last decade.

Bryan advises managers to proactively and frequently assess the temperature of their cultures by using the following methodologies:

Focus Groups: Pull together a small group of agents and employees in a Zoom meeting and ask them a few questions about your culture. Encourage them to talk openly about what they’re experiencing.

Surveys: This tool is useful for addressing issues around collaboration, productivity, and distractions. Don’t use anonymous surveys—you’ll get more effective and action-oriented results by asking individuals to own their opinions.

Outside Assessments: Ask those outside your organization who regularly interact with your agents and employees (ex. ancillary businesses such as mortgage, title, attorneys, etc.) for their perspective on how your agents are doing.

Every real estate organization is at risk without thoughtful and frequent feedback from your agents and employees. It’s always been this way.

What’s changed is the way this information needs to be proactively captured.

More than ever, no news is not good news.

A few weeks ago, I asked you to participate in a nationwide survey conducted by JPAR of agent and manager behaviors.
 
For those of you who participated, thank you.   Here is some of what we learned.
 
Most participants were experienced/high wage earners:  60% of those who responded had more than five years of experience and their average annual income was $129,000.
 
Biggest challenges: 
 
For brokers/owners:  Recruiting committed talent
For team leaders:  Developing systems, process, and structure that drive a consistent experience
For agents: Executing consistently on prospecting, lead generation, and marketing
 
Top 7 agent income related behaviors:
 
1. Personal Assistant:  62% more annual income for those with an assistant vs. those without.
 
2. Database:  70% have/work a database consistently—they earned 60% more annual income.
 
3. Influence Marketing:  53% more annual income for those conducting monthly or quarterly customer events.
 
4. Consistent Follow-up: 37% more annual income for those with a system and process in place supporting five or more follow-up attempts with prospects.
 
5. Business/Marketing Plan:  27% more income for those with a specific marketing plan, 30% more income for those with a specific business plan, 42% more income for those with BOTH a marketing and business-specific plan.
 
6. Tracking/Measuring Daily Activities: 12% more income for those who track/measure daily activities.  82% of highest income earners reported tracking the lead measure of new appointments.
 
7. Lead Conversions:  Most agents reported it takes about 25 conversations to get one sale.
 
There are two recruiting takeaways from this data:
 
a.  Earning more.  If your recruiting value proposition is focused on helping agents earn more, this is a blueprint of where you should be focused.
 
b.  Recruiting more. The behaviors that cause agents to perform at a high level are very similar to the behaviors that make recruiters and hiring managers to perform at a high level. 

Mirror what top preforming agents are doing in the recruiting arena.

Hiring managers often ask me: How frequent should I be contacting my prospects during the follow-up stage of the recruiting process?

Too much can certainly be annoying, but most recruiters error on the side of not enough contact.

According to researchers, increasing frequency taps into what’s called the “mere exposure effect” of attraction.

In simple terms, the more you’re exposed to something or someone, the more attractive it becomes.

Familiarity (covered earlier this week) is the shotgun approach–competitive agents first need to be generally familiar with you and your organization.

The mere exposure effect is a targeted approach—it is best applied to a small group of people you’re trying to recruit.

If an individual sees you and hears from you frequently, an attraction will likely sprout and grow.

Connections can happen in various ways such as an email, a text, a social networking post, or a phone call.

The messages and interactions should be positive, helpful, personal, and timely.

By being proactive and focused on these types of interactions, you’re tipping the terrain so prospects are moving downhill towards you.

When I started writing daily Insights a few years ago, I intended to make them concise and to the point.

My goal was to deliver 60-seconds of recruiting wisdom to busy hiring managers each day.

But some of our readers have expressed an interest in going a little deeper on some topics and connecting with others who are doing the hard work of recruiting each day.

To meet this need, our team is now producing a weekly podcast where we will relay some of the best stories in real estate recruiting and introduce you to the remarkable individuals who have found recruiting success.

While the podcast is a larger time commitment (15 – 20 minutes), you’ll hopefully learn more and find ways to replicate the recruiting methodologies others have discovered.  Let’s get started…

Watch Now

In this week’s podcast, we’ll be talking with Mark Johnson, the President of JPAR Real Estate.  According to Real Trends, JPAR is the 32^nd largest real estate company in the United States.  JPAR has over 4000 agents in 65 locations.

Under Mark’s leadership over the last four years, JPAR has grown its agent count by 250% mostly through organic, boots-on-the-ground recruiting.

Mark will reveal some of his powerful recruiting secrets during our discussion, and shine a light on what it’s like to recruit for a 100% commission brokerage versus more traditional split-commission models.

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 activity

Use 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.

Last week, we learned how visuals (both static and video) capture the attention and help your prospects absorb new ideas and possibilities.

Belle Beth Cooper points out there are two more things you can do to help your prospects envision working on your team.

Present and refer back to the big picture. You tend to remember the big picture better than the details because your brain gets quickly overwhelmed with details.

When the brain takes in new information, it hangs onto it better if it already has some information to relate it to.

This is where starting with the gist of an idea can be helpful: it gives you something to hang each detail on as you learn it.

To apply this concept, you may want to create a large diagram of your overall recruiting value proposition and then explain how each concept fits into the big picture.

You learn best by teaching others. Researchers have long known that teaching on a topic cements new ideas into your brain.

When we expect to have to teach other people what we’re learning, we take in new information better.

We organize it better in our minds, remember it more correctly, and we’re better at remembering the most important parts of what we’ve learned.

Applying this concept is more difficult, but it can be very powerful. 

Try asking a prosect to explain how they’d do something differently based on what they just learned from you.

For example, you could ask: Based on the process we use to secure listings, how would your listing presentations change?

In the end, your prospect must see themselves thriving in your organization before they’ll make a move.

Your job is to lower the barriers that keep this from happening.

The best recruiters are individuals who can get prospects to imagine new possibilities.

This often requires someone to take in new information and process it quickly.

In a post from the archive, Belle Beth Cooper reminds us that this happens most efficiently in the visual realm.

You take in information better when it’s visual. The brain uses 50% of its resources on vision.

Half of your brain power goes to your eyes and the processes necessary to turn what you see into information.

The other half is split up among all the other functions your body must maintain.

Since vision is such a big part of how we interpret the world, it tends to overwhelm our other senses.

And more than just static visuals, we pay special attention to anything that’s moving.

So graphics and pictures are helpful, but animations and videos are even more helpful when you’re trying to explain a new concept or get someone to emotionally engage a new idea.

Try integrating more visuals into your recruiting process.

It takes extra effort to engage a prospect in this way, but it’s effort well-spent if it is what helps them envision themselves working with you.

Any time you attempt something difficult (like recruiting), you’re going to face resistance.

Some of the resistance will be external (competitors, market conditions, economic constraints, etc.) and some will be internal (what you believe about yourself).

According to author Todd Herman, the internal resistance is usually more difficult to overcome because it isn’t obvious.

Internal resistance frequently lies hidden below the surface in what are called “tribal narratives.”

These are stories you’ve been told your whole life about what people ’like you’ can and cannot do.

You’re affected by these narratives because you came from somewhere (ex. family background, schooling, work history) and you’re connected to others (ex. peers, team members, bosses).

Being a part of a tribe brings with it certain beliefs and behaviors.

We’re afraid of challenging these narratives because doing so means leaving who and what we know behind (no one wants to get kicked out of the tribe).

We don’t want to abandon our identities, so we abandon our futures instead.

Don’t let this become your story.

Once you’ve identified the source of these narratives, you’ve taken an important step towards altering your beliefs for the better.

Who’s whispering in your ear?

If you’re asking an agent to leave their current brokerage and join your team, there must be a compelling reason for them to make a change.

The reason for change comes from one of two sources:

1. Their company: Something has caused your prospect to become unhappy and disgruntled.
2. Your company: You’re offering something of value that’s not available from their existing broker.

In a Real Trends podcast, James O’Bryon, CEO of RE/MAX Gold in California, said it’s better to focus on the second option.

The first and most important task of recruiting is you must build an extraordinary company. 

If you don’t, then whatever it is that you’re attempting to present to agents who work for other companies, some of which are extraordinary, is not going to have any great listening ear. 

He goes on to say that you’ll know you’re offering something compelling when the recruiting prospect sees it as a gift.

You’re not trying to sell them anything—you’re offering them a gift.

When you’re giving somebody a gift (and it’s truly a gift) and they don’t want it, you don’t have to feel rejected because it’s just something that doesn’t work for them at that time.

If you can recruit without experiencing rejection, you’ll probably do a lot more recruiting.

Humans are wired for connection.

According to University of Rochester professor Harry Reis, our relationships feel right when we perceive those on the other side of interactions are responsive to us.

Perceived responsiveness entails:

Understanding: the belief that relationship partners understand and appreciate what is important to you.

Validation: the belief your relationship partner respects who you are and what you want.

Caring: the belief your relationship partner will take active and supportive steps to help you get your needs met.

By nature, this is the feedback you’re looking for when you have any conversation.

But you’ll typically do not get this kind of response during a recruiting conversation—especially in the early stages.

How do you get around this obstacle?

1. Push past the initial uneasiness. If you retreat every time you feel a little awkwardness, you’ll never recruit anyone.

Once you know why this resistance exists, it becomes easier to push past it.

2. Turn the tables. You’re not the only one who wants relational responsiveness—your recruiting prospect desires the same thing.

Quickly focus the conversation on providing them the understanding, validation, and caring they crave.

The best recruiting happens when you’re able to rise above your basic need for connectedness and truly help those in your recruiting pipeline.