When trying to find solutions to a difficult problem (like recruiting), most people search for insight from our own experiences, the insights of others, and best practices.

And then they contemplate what might work for them.

While that’s a great place to start, professors Chip and Dan Heath advise taking exploration a step further.

Research suggests that reflecting or ruminating on our own thoughts and feelings is an ineffective way to achieve true understanding.

Studying your own behavior is more fruitful.

It’s better to take a risk, try something, and distill the answer from experience rather than navel-gazing.

Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action.

Successful recruiters and hiring managers take action based on the possibility that a promising tactic may produce positive results.

And then they measure results.

Not at the macro level (did I get a hire), but at the micro level (did my call script cause my recruiting prospect to engage).

Each small action that proves successful adds to your insight.

A recruiting “touch” is a proactive attempt to engage one of your prospects.

A touch could be delivered via mediums such as email, hand-written note, text, social media message, phone call, and others.

While it’s easy to understand the need for touches, some recruiters and hiring managers struggle to develop a strategy to make them happen.

I recently spoke to a hiring manager who organizes recruiting touches into the following categories.

Introductory: Here’s who I am and why it might be beneficial for us to connect.

Helpful: Here’s something that could help your business be more successful.

Personal: I noticed something about you and what’s going on in your life.

Promotional: Here’s something you may want to take advantage of that we’re offering.

Brand Impression: Here’s what we stand for in the marketplace.

As you plan out recruiting touches, rotate your messages across the different categories.

The objective is to frequently remind your recruiting prospects of your existence and interest in their career.

Initiating touches from varying angles keeps your messages from appearing canned and one-dimensional.

The experienced agent recruiting process often starts with a personal connection (a referral, a phone conversation, a coop connection, etc.)

An important second step is what your prospect finds online about you and your company.

According to researchers:

83% of job seekers spend more than hour researching a company/opportunity before engaging.

60% of job seekers report that what they find online about a company is “very influential” or “extremely influential” in their decision to engage.

Your “online picture” should reflect the real-life activities the recruiting prospect would experience if they joined your team.

It’s an opportunity to wow, woo, seduce and excite talent.

Top talent doesn’t want to work in Dullsville.

They want to work in a company that understands, challenges, excites, surprises and delights them.

They want to work hard, play hard, and feel appreciated.

If meeting you is supported by what your prospect finds online, the opportunity starts to feel a lot more real.

For the professional talent manager, hiring doesn’t end when the new agent recruit comes onboard.

It ends when your new hire has gained traction quickly and started to make a valuable contribution to your team.

For new agents, initial sales may not materialize right away, but revenue-producing lead measures can be tracked and evaluated.

If your new hire is not performing these lead measures with more focus, energy, and competency than your average agent, you may have a failed hire.

When poor performance is noted, provide training, set clear expectations, and watch closely for tangible performance improvements.

If they can’t meet reasonable expectations and fail to respond your training and coaching, then release the agent.

There is lots of talent available.

And it’s better to replace someone early than attempt to push them uphill.

As many individuals sought to enter the industry over the last two years, real estate companies have thrown open their doors and gladly hired them.

The number of real estate agents has swollen to an all-time high, and it’s become increasingly difficult for these new agents to gain traction.

In one sense, this is a mismanagement of talent.

Rather than using the nationwide employment churn to upgrade the success profile of the average agent, most brokerages are diluting the talent pool with unqualified individuals.

How do you keep this from happening in your company?   

Raise your hiring standards.

In the professional hiring manager’s mind, not everyone makes the cut.

They must meet selection criteria that is well-established and reflective of the desired performance level of the organization.

Your selection criteria can include factors such as work history, interview performance, desired character traits, social network characteristics and capacities, assessment results, and other factors you’ve documented that will lead to success.

The goal is not to craft the perfect selection system. It’s to have a system you’ve thoughtfully created.

Most real estate hiring managers err on the side of not having a selection system at all.

When aggressively growing an organization, many managers have a “more is better” mentality.

Professional talent managers have a “better is better” mentality.

They first think: If I’m going to hire someone, who is this person going to replace?

The upgrade mindset forces you to focus on quality and organically raises your hiring standards over time.

The goal is to get to the place where there is no one left to replace.

At this point, you’ve built an organization of top-level performers, and any future additions must meet the higher performance bar.

Do you think this can’t be done?

I know of one real estate office where the average agent completes 30 transactions per year.

And, yes, it’s run by a professional talent manager who handles new agent recruiting.

I recently partnered with Real Trends to publish a long-form article on new agent talent management.

I’ll cover a few high points in the next couple Insights, but you’re welcome to jump ahead if you want to read it all in one sitting.

There are professional talent managers in every industry.

They don’t carry this job title or wear name tags, but they consistently hire better than their peers and build teams full of individuals who perform significantly above industry averages.

These professional talent managers see the churn in the employment market as a great opportunity to capture high-potential individuals, but they see hiring through a different lens.

If you’re aspiring to become a professional talent manager, here are some of the things you’ll need to do differently.

Never stop hiring.

Many offices (virtual or physical) are already near capacity.

There is a tendency to think,

I need to stop hiring so I can better train, coach, and manage the agents I already have on my team.

This sounds reasonable on the surface, but professional talent mangers know that growing a high-performing team is not a static process.

There needs to be a constant flow of new players on and off the team to find the true high performers.

Think of it like a professional baseball team.

If you have a mediocre team, does it make sense to abandon your farm system? Of course not.

Up-and-coming talent will always be part of the equation for building the successful teams of the future.

Both in baseball and in real estate.

Successful recruiters use checklists.

They not only help you get more done, but your brain loves them.

According to research summarized by best-selling author Maria Konnikova, here are some of the reasons why.

Your mind seeks organization. Lists tap into our preferred way of receiving and organizing information at a subconscious level; from an information-processing standpoint, they often hit our attentional sweet spot.

When we process information, we do so spatially. For instance, it’s hard to memorize through brute force the groceries we need to buy. It’s easier to remember everything if we write it down in bulleted or numbered points (even if you forgot your list at home).

Your mind wants to categorize. We can’t process information quickly when it’s clustered and undifferentiated (like in standard paragraphs). A list feels more intuitive.

Your mind wants to know how long this will take. The more we know about something—including precisely how much time it will consume—the greater the chance we will commit to it.

List completion is self-reinforcing. We recall with pleasure that we were able to check something off the list. This makes us want to go back to the list for another dopamine hit.

Do your brain a favor and break down your recruiting process into a series of checklists.

No one is going to join your team unless they trust you.

How do you build trust in the limited time you have with prospects?

In a post from the archive, Geoffrey James answers this question from a sales prospect perspective.

The same principles apply to recruiting.

Be curious about people. People are drawn to those who show true interest in them. Curiosity about people is thus a crucial element of relationship building.  Having an abiding fascination in others gives you the opportunity to learn new things and make new connections.

Be consistent. A customer’s ability to trust you is dependent upon showing the customer that your behavior is consistent and persistent over time. When a customer can predict your behavior, that customer is more likely to trust you.

Seek the truth. Trust emerges when you approach selling as a way of helping the customer–so make it your quest to discover the real areas where the you can work together.  Never be afraid to point out that your product or company may not be the right fit.

Keep an open mind. If you’re absolutely convinced the customer needs your product, the customer will sense you’re close-minded and become close-minded in return.  Instead, be open to the idea that the customer might be better served elsewhere. In turn, customers will sense that you’ve got their best interests at heart.

Be a professional. Customers tend to trust individuals who are serious about what they do, and willing to take the time to achieve a deep understanding of their craft. Take the time every day to learn more about your customers, their industry and their challenges.

The best recruiters take the time and put in the effort to build trust because they know the payoff for this effort is hires.

If retention worries keep you up at night, you may want to implement one of John Sullivan’s retention techniques.

It’s a little more complex than some of the other ideas I’ve shared in previous Insights, but worth the effort.

Identify the flight risks.

To execute this technique, you’ll need to maintain a close relationship and open dialog with many of the agents in your office.

Hopefully, you’re doing this already as this is the foundational component of all other retention techniques.

As an added bonus, you may want to record a quick video interview with a couple of your brown-grassers.

Here is an example of company who published a Grass Isn’t Greener Interview.

Could you make a video like this for your office?

Companies like Porsche know certain emotions are baked into the human psyche and can be depended upon when consumers make expensive decisions.

Case in point: Porsche just introduced its first fully-electric roadster—the Taycan.

Compared to a Tesla (it’s main competitor), it does not make logical sense to buy this car. As the WSJ recently surmised:

In the bench-racing matchup between Porsche’s best electric and the Tesla Model S Long Range, it’s a rout.

The situation would seem to be disconcerting for Porsche, whose brand has always promised empirically superior performance to the competition.

But Porsche doesn’t seem to be worried even though the Taycan is double the price of the Tesla.

How does Porsche expect to successfully compete?

By understanding the mind of the luxury sport car buyer.

It’s helpful here to remember the chronic urges that form the impulse for luxury automobiles—envy, pride, exclusivity, scarcity, status, the pursuit of the next.

Some of your recruiting prospects are affected by these same emotions along with some others, as well.

Leading with your feature/benefit spec sheet that describes why you’re better than your competitors puts you at a disadvantage.

You’ll be much more likely to win if you engage your prospect’s emotions, hopes, and dreams first.

And then later reveal you’re also the best choice on all the important metrics too.

One of the hiring managers I work with asked a great question earlier this week:

I just set up a recruiting appointment with a prospect to whom I was referred.

Should I be more direct and scripted in my responses? 

In recruiting, the first priority is to connect to the human side of a person.

Process, metrics, and data have their place, but it shouldn’t be given priority over the human-to-human connection.

It’s important to first relate to and connect with a prospect’s concerns. This is where the touchy-feely shines.

Seth Godin once wrote:

You must embrace the fact that human beings are 94% irrational, making decisions based on feelings, expectations and culture.

By ignoring the feelings, you have a 6% chance of winning.

If you’re focused on experienced agent recruiting, you’re competing for talented agents alongside other real estate companies.

When you’re focused on new agent recruiting, you’re competing against the broader market of opportunities where an individual could possibly work.

According to The Conference Board, an interesting phenomenon is happening in the labor market.

Wages and salaries have been trending upward strongly for blue collar and service jobs. In leisure and hospitality, wages are growing particularly fast.

By contrast, professional, management, and related fields have only seen modest pay increases.

And the workload in professional positions has increased because of the large number of workers (10 million) who left the workforce during the pandemic and have not returned. Many of these workers report being burned-out in their current jobs.

In the past, the real estate industry has offered those in hospitality and leisure an upgrade in their careers.

This message is falling flat.

Offering professionals a lateral transfer to the real industry that offers more flexibility, remote work conditions, and control over their workload is ringing true.

From the prospect’s perspective, recruiting starts with a compelling need for change.

In a recent blog post, Peter Diamandis provided some valuable insight on how to get your emails read by your recruiting prospects.

Keep it under five lines. I don’t read emails over five lines. I just don’t. I don’t have time for it. If you can’t communicate your message in the first few lines, it shouldn’t be an email—instead, the email should be a request for a phone call or meeting.

Make the subject line unique, meaningful, and easily searchable. I’m frequently searching for emails I previously scanned, and I need to be able to remember unique keywords in your email subject to find it quickly. Otherwise, it’s going to get buried.

Use easy-to-read formatting. It sounds intuitive, but you’d be shocked by how many emails I get with font size 9. Hard to read means it’s not read. Use line breaks to your advantage. Spacing is key. Give important details their own lines.

Make the ask really, really simple—so simple, it’s hard for your reader to say “no.”  Have your email make a single, specific, simple request:  “Do you have time for a 5 min call this week?”  “Can you make a quick intro to XYZ person?”  I should be able to reply to the email in one word (ideally yes or no).

Email is not a replacement for a phone call. Keep emails very short and factual. If they are long, then schedule a call or a meeting.

These rules may not apply to every email you send, but they do help you better understand what your readers are experiencing.

Great recruiting starts with great communication.