Robert Caildini and other researchers discovered that humans are innately motivated to be consistent with the things they’ve previously said or done.

When engaging a new recruiting prospect, this is a helpful thing to know.

Consistency is activated by asking for small initial commitments that can be easily made

When seeking to influence using the consistency principle, look for voluntary, active, and public commitments.

For new-to-real-estate prospects, the initial commitment to engage in the recruiting process happens when they apply.

For experienced agent prospects, the small commitment of “it’s OK to contact me” should be proactively requested.

Why?

It opens your recruiting prospects to being influenced by your follow-on communication and makes follow-on commitments more likely.

Subconsciously, they’re thinking:

I’ll read what you send me because I gave you permission to contact me.

I’m open to making a big commitment (changing companies) because I’ve already made smaller commitments to you and they worked out.

Influencing others is a subtle and nuanced process where small details make all the difference.

Muhammad Ali once said,

I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit!’  Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.

I have met very few high-performing recruiters and hiring managers who…

Love picking up the phone and making an uncomfortable call.

Love getting rejected by a recruiting prospect who’s marginally successful.

Love being stood-up on a recruiting appointment.

Love initiating a meaningful recruiting dialog and later getting ghosted.

Love setting and protecting a recruiting time block in their schedule.

Love doing the tedious work of updating their recruiting database and building a prospect list.

Love doing all the other proactive tasks that lead to recruiting success.

Instead, the high-performers focus on the results and personal wins they seek.

This could be increasing your personal income, defeating a competitor, experiencing the accomplishment of growing a successful office, or seeing the light in an agent’s eyes who you’ve helped reach remarkable success.

Everyone wants to be a champion, but few are willing to make the sacrifices to become one.

Are you up to the challenge?

The great military strategist Sun Tzu once said: All wars are won or lost before they are ever fought.

Recruiting is not war, but it does feel like a battle.

If you don’t have a plan, you will lose.

However, not all plans are created equal.

Successful recruiters spend time and effort creating and refining an effective strategy to increase their likelihood of success.

The second way to fail is inconsistent execution.

A plan that you suspend during difficult times isn’t really a plan—it’s just a good intention.

And many hiring managers don’t follow through on their good intentions when things get chaotic.

For example, they set time blocks for proactive recruiting activities, but let them be overrun by the urgency of agents who demand their attention.

I heard this sage advice years ago: You have to be smart enough to develop a plan and stupid enough to follow it.

The pandemic has changed a lot of things in the business world.

Is it now OK to skip the face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) interview?

In a post from the archive, René Shimada Siegel reminds us that there are still some distinct advantages to connecting in person with your prospects.

You’re off the record. Many prospects work in places where they can’t have private conversations. Over sushi or a latte or a walk around the block, prospects can let me know more — with more color – what’s really going on in their lives.

You’re reading body language. Facial expressions often communicate so much more than words and they don’t come across in a live-stream like they do in person. From looking at a person’s eyes and body language, I can see confidence, empathy, fear, friendliness, sincerity, and a host of other emotions. 

As the use of technology continues to evolve in the real estate industry, don’t completely give in to the siren’s call. After all, these are still humans you’re trying to hire.

Jeff Glover, a high-performing team leader in Michigan recorded a podcast giving agents and team leaders a litany of advice on how to be successful in a hyper-competitive real estate market.

The 17-item list was cleverly structured as all the things you need to be doing in lesser amounts.

Most of the advice is pointed at agents, but some of it had direct application to recruiting.

Item 16—Add less prospects to your database.

Instead: Look for leads who actually want to talk real estate

If you’re using recruitment marketing to generate leads, quickly zero in on the ones who are willing/able to seriously focus on a real estate career.

Move those individuals into your database for further action.

If you’re building a recruitment database of experienced agents, build a high-quality list of manageable size.

It’s far more productive to focus on a smaller group of known agents than attempting to reach the masses.

For recruiting, less is often more, and when you focus on less, the results expand.

In a recent blog post, Rich Millington challenged the traditional wisdom of sending a thank you note.

Thank you notes feel like the right thing to do in most situations.

The problem is people tend to give them little time or attention.

The moment they see ‘thank you’ in the subject line of an email [or on the surface of a card], they know what to expect.

And a thank you note feels like a final message, and it often ends the discussion.

I think Rich may be minimizing the importance and benefit of expressing gratitude, but his alternative of sending a “next-steps” note is brilliant.

Listing out the next steps someone can take drives more activity.

It shows the recipient you want to keep them involved, and you think they have more to give.

Could gratitude be combined with some “next-steps” in a single message?

Perhaps this would be the best for recruiting correspondence—it feels warm, but acknowledges the need to keep things moving.

Last week, Tom Ferry posted a Happy New Year blog.

It was his way of reminding agents to start their business planning for next year.

While the calendar might say September, for business purposes, it’s already 2022.

Which means one thing: NOW is the time to start creating your 2022 business plan.

While Tom has a large following and many agents take his advice, this is a timeline many high-performing agents have followed for years.

And it only makes sense that when agents are reflecting on the past year and crafting new plans, the thought of changing brokerages might enter their minds.

This is especially true if they don’t see how their current brokers are going to help them reach their emerging goals and aspirations.

If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, it’s not the time to be sitting on the recruiting sidelines.  There’s too much happening and important decisions are being made.

If you wait until the actual New Year to double down on your recruiting efforts, you’ll have already missed the best opportunities.

You’ll know you’ve conducted a good interview if you’ve uncovered some of your prospect’s pain.

Individuals typically change careers (or agents change companies) to solve a problem.

Crafting unique solutions to very specific points of pain helps build a strong connection to your prospect and elevates you to a trusted advisor role.

But don’t stop there.

Since it often takes time and additional follow-up conversations/meetings to complete the hiring process, successful hiring managers maintain their trusted advisor role by frequently reminding the prospect of the unique pain they’re experiencing.

It’s easy to fall back into the feature/benefit mode during the follow-up process.

Here’s all the great things we do.

Here’s why we’re better than our competitors.

It’s the script we’re most comfortable using, but it’s not the one that resonates with the prospect.

Restating the pain during the follow-up part of the hiring process reminds the prospect why they’re engaged and demonstrates you care.

Without this reminder, the motivation to change dissolves away.

In a post from the archive, Colin Wilson reminds us that asking questions is the first and most important job of a hiring manager or recruiter.

It elevates you to a position of influence in three ways.

Value. Your value to your candidate is not measured by what you know, but by what you bring to the surface during the dialog.

If you make them feel you’re most concerned about their problems and their opportunities, you’re winning. People care most about themselves.

If you want to be an influential recruiter, here’s a rule-of-thumb: Spend at least 70% of the time you’re interacting with prospects asking questions.

That’s good advice for most situations in life, but not for recruiting.

Why? 

Because recruiting top talent is an intense competition between firms, and the winners are those that proactively and aggressively brag about the factors that make their company a great place to work.

You can’t win talent competitions when you keep those differentiating factors hidden from your targeted applicants.

Bragging means that you must differentiate yourself and make it crystal clear in the prospect marketplace how and why your opportunities are more exciting and special.

There are many reasons recruiters and hiring managers don’t brag, but here are a few of the most common.

They haven’t figured out what really makes them “exciting and special.”

They don’t know how to distribute the messages to a targeted set of recruiting prospects.

Everyone has a story to tell. Spend the time and effort to tell yours.

In a recent podcast, Guy Gal, the founder and CEO of Side, describes who his brokerage is recruiting.

Over 70% of agents in the real estate industry are part-time and complete 3 to 7 transactions per year. 

The mission of Side is to recruit and empower the full-time agent who is completing more than 30 transactions per year.

We don’t want to help everyone—just the 200,000 high-producing agents and teams in the country who fit our unique profile.

Like most successful businesses, Side has identified a recruiting niche.

But how they got there is counterintuitive– they started by intentionally excluding a large majority of the available opportunities in the marketplace.

Then, they focused on an even smaller group of agents they felt they could uniquely assist and were not being serviced by strong competitors.

In the end, they proactively chose to ignore more than 90% of the agents in the marketplace.

With less than 10% left, they can now focus more effectively on both prospecting and delivering valuable solutions.

A while back, Erica Ramus wrote an outstanding article for Inman (subscription required) on how to tell when your agents are about to leave your brokerage.

Here is part of Erica’s list:

Decreased Productivity/Listings Disappear. If a regularly producing agent suddenly has fewer new listings flowing in or buyer sales on the books, what’s going on?

Loss of focus. Are leads not being followed up on promptly? Are buyer deals suddenly falling through at a higher rate than normal? Frequently an agent with one foot out the door is distracted and loses focus.

Cool or Negative Attitude. An agent who is leaving starts to distance themselves from the group. They skip meetings and might stop answering the phone when a colleague or manager calls.

Questions Authority/Open Disputes. An agent who no longer cares about what the broker or manager thinks may become combative in the end.

While managers need to pay attention to these issues to retain their productive agents, a savvy recruiter will use the same signs to determine which competitive agents are most vulnerable.

It’s easier to keep your ear to the ground when you know what you’re listening for.

Recruiting prospects are naturally attracted to hiring managers they know, like, and trust.

They’re repelled by those who seem to have short-term agendas.

But most recruiters face a dilemma —you’re under pressure to produce short-term results and it’s hard to keep that pressure from tainting your interactions with prospects.

If you ease up, you may not get the results.

If you increase focus on results, you may start to repel those you’re trying to recruit.

How do you solve this dilemma?

According to Larry Kendall, proactively change your focus so every interaction is about creating short-term value rather than short-term results.

People move towards value. If you have something they value, something they want, they will be attracted to you. Your mission is to create value.

How do you create value with a recruiting prospect?

By solving problems and making them feel good.

When value creation becomes your focus, you’ll find yourself putting aside your personal needs and authentically connecting with those who will be your future hires.

The results will come (and in greater amounts), but only after you help those you’re trying to recruit.

For most real estate recruiters, conversations via text message happen more frequently than calling and emailing combined.

If you’re new to using texting for recruiting, it may be helpful to follow a few best practices compiled by a texting vendor who recently evaluated over 9 million business text messages.

Here are some dos and don’ts:

Do use texting—it has a 10x response rate compared to calling and emailing.

Do sign-off personally, but don’t use a full email-type signature.

How do you know if you’re doing a good job texting?

Pay attention to your response rate.

If your recruiting prospects are not responding to your text messages, that’s a red flag. It means you need to change with whom and/or how you’re communicating.

With texting, there’s a fine line between truly connecting and annoying someone.

As a recruiter or hiring manager, you’re constantly searching for talented individuals to join your team.

But, what makes an individual talented?

Bestselling authors Arthur Yeung and Dave Ulrich suggest getting a clear definition of talent provides the necessary framework for the rest of the hiring process.

These authors define talent via this simple equation:

Talent = Competence × Commitment × Contribution

Some people restrict their definition of talent to just competence.

Does the individual have the knowledge, skills, and values required to perform the agent role?

While this is an important factor to consider, the other two components should also be taken into account because they have a multiplying effect.

Assessing for commitment is something many hiring managers also consider.

Is this prospect willing to make a full-time commitment and be fully dedicated to their real estate career?

The final component, contribution, is something most hiring managers don’t consider because it requires you to view hiring through your customer’s eyes.

How is a recruiting prospect going to contribute to my customer’s success? (or, What skills and abilities do your customers value most?)

There’s an assumption this information is already known, but researchers have found that many organizations are surprisingly self-focused and have a blind spot in this area.

Expanding the definition of talent per this equation is a great foundation from which to build.

It brings you closer to understanding what really causes some agents to be high performers.