On the first day of work, most managers encourage a new agent to start building their sales database.

Over time, this database becomes a powerful source of leads, opportunities, and income.

A small or incomplete database hinders a new agent’s chances of experiencing success, and a robust database that’s never worked produces equally disappointing results.

A database that grows stagnant through neglect is the biggest disappointment of all—both for the new agent and for their prospects who were inconsistently engaged.

What’s good for your agents is good for you.

If you don’t have a recruiting database you’re consistently working, you can’t expect to be successful.

And you’ll feel guilty about instructing your agents to so something you’re not willing to do on your own.

When someone raises a complaint on your team, are you able to ask probing, non-defensive questions about the topic?

Do your questions encourage a free flow of information to be exchanged?

Do the real, underlying issues of complaints come to the surface during your discussions?

If not, you may need to change your mindset on how you handle negative information.

In a post from the archive, Dave Mashburn describes how a professional communicators handle complaints.

1. They assume the complaint is not the real problem. This allows the follow-on questions to be non-defensive. For example, if someone is complaining about fees, ask questions that would reveal what it would take to experience value.

2. They display a high level of confidence. Confidence is an incredibly powerful trait. As opposed to arrogance, confidence is the mix of knowing your craft so well that you can be a tremendous resource to those who need it while still coming across as humble and approachable.

3. They dissociate with chronic complainers. Professionals do business with those who appreciate the value of their work. There are some people who cannot be helped. It’s better to focus on those who respect your contribution.

Your high-potential agents need a strong leader who does not wilt when complaints surface.

Can you rise to this level?

Like most parts of the economy, the recruiting industry is trying to utilize technology to reduce costs, improve human interactions, and make hiring better for everyone involved.

But the innovation hype often outpaces what can really be done.

In a recent podcast, Max Armbruster, founder of TalkPush, helped define the limits of where technology can truly benefit the recruiting process.

Technology that recognizes what a user is doing…and recognizes this sequence happens over and over again [is helpful because it] can then be automated.

This is especially true for repetitive tasks that involve recruiters.

Probably 60-70% of the cost per hire is related to the human interactions necessary to make the hire happen.

The promise of recruitment automation is that rudimentary and repetitive tasks can be automated.

Does this mean your job as recruiters or hiring managers are in jeopardy?

Not anytime soon.

Humans are still needed to make connections, facilitate engagements, and inspire recruiting prospects to take action.

As more recruitment automation takes hold, productive recruiters will be doing more of the things only humans can do and less of the tasks a machine can do better.

Ron Friedman says there is a wrong way to think about creativity.

Some believe that creativity requires originality and by definition, originality can’t possibly be found inside the works of others.

Studying others closely, no matter how benign their intention, will influence their approach, encourage duplication, and reduce them to hacks.

But in the real world, this notion is unrealistic and counterproductive because it doesn’t reflect how most new ideas are formed.

According to researchers, the people who have the best ideas recognize:

Creativity comes from blending ideas, not isolation. Your mind is opened more by observing and experiencing what others are doing.

Originality is not the same thing as creativity. Some of the remarkable successes in business come from an adaptation of a first mover (ex. PalmPilot / iPhone).

Reverse engineering enables an individual to acquire new skills, which empowers them to be generative in entirely new ways. This shortens the learning curve and allows you to recognize quickly if something will gain traction.

To develop creative recruiting solutions, take inventory of the most successful recruiting companies in your marketplace.

What methodologies, practices, and techniques are they using to be successful? Look for patterns. They always seem to ____________.

Which of these patterns can be replicated in your organization? What tweaks need to be made to make the idea fit in your culture?

How can the new idea be tested and measured quickly? What works for your competitor may not work for you, and you need to find this out quickly.

Getting ahead of your competitors is easier when you step on their shoulders to get started.

Author Kate Harrison makes a compelling case for getting better at storytelling.

You are 22 times more likely to remember a fact when it has been wrapped in a story. Why? Because stories are memorable, help us grab the gist of an idea more quickly, and trigger emotions.

How do you build a story in a business environment?

Harrison suggests using these four components:

Setting. This is the attention-grabbing context and parameters about your topic. For example: More than 80% of agents who start a real estate career are languishing at the end of their first year.

Character. Connect the setting to a real person who was experiencing the harsh realities of the setting. Meet Sarah, a 35-year-old personal trainer with a large sphere of influence from her previous business…

Conflict. Describe the energy, excitement, and resources Sarah poured into her real estate business to get it off the ground. Explain the pain and disappointment she felt when things didn’t work out as she had hoped.

Resolution. Show how you rescued Sarah at her lowest point of despair and then share how successful she is today because of the help you provided.

After using the story to subtly define utopia, your recruiting prospects will be more open to considering your call to action.

At this stage, it’s appropriate to introduce more data and proof, but it won’t be remembered if the story didn’t initially capture their attention.

A few years ago, the Gallup Organization published some interesting research on the importance of the first-level manager. The researcher found…

Employees are more likely to be engaged in their work when their basic needs are met — for example, they know what is expected of them at work, have the materials and equipment to do their job right and have opportunities to do what they do best every day.

So, how do they get these basic needs met?

Surprisingly, the first-level manager accounts for 70% of what causes an employee to feel strongly connected to their company or team.

From a recruiting perspective, this is valuable information.

The recruiting prospects most likely to make a change are those who have disengaged managers.

For experienced agent recruiting, focus your effort on competitors that are known to have poor first level managers. Agents are most likely to change companies when the agent-manager relationship is lacking, disrupted, or strained.

For new-to-real-estate agents, make sure your interviews include several open-ended questions about the candidate’s experience with their current and previous managers.

Often this is where the pain and frustration exist.

In a post from the archive, John Sullivan reveals the most common mistake well-meaning managers make to drive their high-potential agents to competitors.

When someone comes along that quickly performs at a high level, the tendency is to first marvel at such a thing and then hold that person up as an example.

Surprisingly, this is exactly what gives your competitors a foothold.

Why? Because when a person starts to figure out they’re high-potential, all types of strange behaviors ensue—both with the individual and with others on the team.

Here is an abbreviated list of what can go wrong:

Competitors notice. If you tell someone that they’re high potential, it’s likely the news will spread both inside and outside the organization.

They struggle with setbacks. There is increased frustration if early successes and perceived opportunities don’t materialize.

They stop improving. If a person is aware of their status, they may not see the value in seeking out training, coaching, and mentors.

They stop working. Following acknowledgement, the agent may expect things to happen automatically and go into coast mode assuming their future is set.

They get a big ego. Encouraging someone lets them know they are valuable, but it may also create an ego boost resulting in a change of behavior (i.e. arrogance, sense of entitlement, etc.)

Others get frustrated. When you identify someone as high potential, others may react unfavorably, especially if the designation is viewed as biased, unfair, or made too early.

Others start to sabotage. An agent could face subtle or direct attacks from individuals who feel that they don’t deserve the designation.

What’s the alternative? Treat the high-potential agent like you expected this all along and others on the team expected them to be a high-performer, as well.

Nothing unusual here—it’s what normally happens when talented newcomers work with us.

In his new book, Professor Ron Friedman challenges the notion that greatness only comes through inner talent and practice.

There is a third story about greatness, one that is not often shared.

It’s called reverse engineering. 

Reverse engineering means studying what others are doing with a high level of scrutiny and attention to detail. And then applying what you learned to a related endeavor.

Dr. Friedman demonstrates how the great innovations in technology, business, education, culture, politics, relationships, and most other fields were created through some sort of reverse engineering.

It only makes sense that something this powerful should be applied to recruiting, as well.

We’ll touch back on this topic in some future Insights, but let’s start the process of reverse engineering recruiting with asking a few simple questions:

Who are the companies, offices, and teams who are recruiting most successfully in your marketplace?

Amazon has more than one million employees and recruited more than 400,000 in 2020. What methodologies are they using that could be used in real estate?

It’s arrogant and misguided to think all the good ideas will be spontaneously generated inside your brain.

The smartest and most successful recruiters know better.

In a recent newsletter, executive coach Todd Herman outlined the three mistakes most small business owners make when they fail to gain traction in their businesses.

Mistake 1: Not focusing on a specific audience or niche and solving a relevant problem for those individuals.

This mistake happens when there’s too much focus on what you’re offering and less concern for the real pains or problems a market is experiencing.

To fix this, focus on a specific problem someone cares about solving.

Mistake 2: There is friction between how you market, how you sell, and what you charge.

This mistake happens when there is lack of clarity about the perceived value of what you’re offering. People hate to be ripped off, but they’re more than willing to a fair price for a valuable service. They also want to be marketed to in a way that feels respectful.

To fix this, spend some extra time clearly defining what you’re offering and how much it’s worth from the perspective of your prospect.

Mistake 3: Poor execution.

A lot of really great products and services sit around collecting dust simply because the resources of the business owner aren’t being focused properly. A lack of discipline and focus on the most valuable activities are to blame for these failures.

To fix this, get serious about dedicating time, energy, and resources to the activities that truly produce the most revenue, opportunities, and wins for your business.

These three mistakes are the same ones that consistently show up in the experienced agent recruiting process.

What you’re asking your agents to do when running their small businesses needs to be mirrored in how you perform recruiting.

It’s a great way to lead by example.

If you want to be a great conversationist, it’s more important to be interested than it is to be interesting.

According to psychologist Todd Kashdan, curiosity is what keeps a dialog with a new contact going, and it’s the secret sauce that causes relationships to flourish in their early stages.

Curious people have better relationships, connect better, and enjoy socializing more. Other people are more easily attracted and feel socially closer to individuals that display curiosity.

But this is not the only advantage–being curious also helps lessen the negative feelings of rejection.

Research published by the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated that curious individuals who experience social rejection are less likely to experience reductions in life satisfaction and increases in feelings of depression.

Something about staying curious might allow us to recover more quickly from social rejection—an experience that can feel devastating.

How do you become more curious?

At the core level, it is driven by a sincere interest in the lives of others. People can sense when you really want to know about them and are willing to forgo talking about yourself.

At a practical level, curious people ask more questions and listen more intently.

As one Harvard study concluded:

People who are liked the most, ironically enough, are the ones who often say the least.

I was recently working with one of my kids on a student loan and had the opportunity to interact with the finance company, SallieMae.

After three months of back-and-forth communication with their sales and customer service functions, I could not be more impressed.

While they masterfully weaved together the use of email, text, video and web technology to outline and execute the education loan, the most impressive component of the process was their unwavering focus on a single underlying objective.

This objective was summed up in the first line of an email I recently received:

Thank you for letting us help to make your dream of education a reality.

Recruiters and hiring managers would be wise to adopt this perspective.

For a new agent, your first and most important objective is to help your recruiting prospect’s dream of having a successful real estate career become a reality.

This objective should drive how you communicate, interview, negotiate, follow-up, onboard, and perform every other recruiting task.

It should taint everything you do, and be what prospects remember about working with you.

In a post from the archive, Kellogg business school professor Ben Jones challenges the traditional idea that brainstorming is the best way to generate new ideas.

Many teams operate under the false assumption that the traditional tenants of brainstorming (encouraging a plethora of free-flowing ideas absent any criticism or judgement) is the best way to stimulate creative thought.

Research from Yale dating back to the late ‘50’s questioned the value of brainstorming, but most organizations continued to use it for decades thereafter despite its lack of efficacy.

So, what should you and your team do instead of brainstorm?

Based on his research, Dr. Jones made these two suggestions:

Continue to talk about new ideas in a group setting. It’s clear that creativity occurs within community. There is something about developing a community of people around a central goal that cultivates and initiates creativity.

Take off the kid gloves. The ineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from ideas that should be shared in a judgement free environment. Debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to what others are sharing.

It takes a good leader to pull this off, and it’s the reason most organizations default to traditional brainstorming.

Earlier this week, the WSJ reported some strange happenings in the job market.

Here’s what we already know:

-20 million jobs were lost due to the pandemic in March/April of 2020
-13.4 million people have gone back to work to fill the jobs previously vacated
-the remaining 6.6 million individuals who used to be working have not     returned to their jobs
-the U.S. economy is producing (GDP) at its pre-pandemic level in spite of   having these workers on the sideline

Here is the strange part:

-there are currently 10.1 million job openings—the highest level of openings in   more than 20 years
-there are 8.1 million people who are reporting themselves as unemployed
(the definition of “unemployed” is someone who wants to work, but hasn’t   been able to successfully land a job)

What gives?

There seems to be a complex mismatch between what employers have to offer (positions, locations, working arrangements, etc.) and what unemployed workers are willing to accept.

Part of the reluctance to return to a previous job/career is related to many workers getting a taste of autonomy and being released from traditional work arrangements (i.e. escaping from commuting and going to an office every day).

The great employment churn will continue for several more months and may stretch into next year.

While this churn may feel unsettling, it’s a great opportunity for the real estate industry.

Many talented individuals have been dislodged from their traditional mindsets and see working as an agent in a new light.

It’s important to maintain high standards during this time, but some of the new agents you hire during this post-pandemic period will be your next top performers. And some of them will be super-performers.

It happened during the last downturn (there was lots of churn then too), and it’s happening again.

Your beliefs have a profound effect on your recruiting outcomes.

Your beliefs about yourself. Your beliefs about your company. Your beliefs about your competitors.

Are you really a great manager? You are for an agent who needs the type of guidance you offer.

Is what you’re proposing really that compelling? It is for an individual who needs what you provide.

Are your competitors’ solutions better than yours? They are for some recruiting prospects, but not for everyone.

Much of the fear, languishing, and paralysis experienced by recruiters and hiring managers comes from a belief that they have to be better than everyone else in the marketplace in order to compete.

You don’t have to be the best option.

You just have to be the best option for a subset of agents who would benefit the most from what you have to offer.

The first and most important steps in recruiting are to quantify, find, and engage those individuals.

The nature of being a first-level real estate manager means you must be readily accessible to your agents.

But it doesn’t mean you can’t manage these interactions more strategically.

According to time management expert, Maura Thomas, the best leaders use these questions and interactions as an opportunity to train, mentor, and grow those they support.

Set boundaries for your [agents], making sure they understand the responsibilities of their role, the types of decisions they can and should make on their own, and the general limits of their authority.

Then, encourage them to find their own solutions to day-to-day problems.

Instead of answering questions, try using the phrase, “I trust your judgment.”

The more successful your direct reports become in solving their problems on their own, the more their confidence will grow.

If you do this consistently, the questions and interruptions will become less frequent.

In turn, you’ll have more time to work on the proactive tasks (like recruiting and retention) that enable your own production and growth.

If you find yourself resisting this approach, you’re probably a micromanager.

This creates an unnecessary burden on your own time and it also stalls your team’s growth.