Boomerang hires are the agents who once worked for your company and later decide to come back for a second tour of duty.

There are some hiring managers who hold a grudge towards individuals who leave their team.

If an agent leaves our company and goes to work for a competitor, they’re dead to me!

According to Marinela Gombosev, this is both a foolish management and hiring position to take.

Some of your best hires will be boomerangs, and they’ll be more valuable the second time around.

Gombosev cites several reasons why boomerang hires are so valuable.

They know your culture. It takes new hires time to integrate into your organization. Boomerangs get up to speed more quickly.

They’ve learned from the outside. There is much to learn from how other companies do business. Boomerangs bring this knowledge back with them.

They’re great retention advocates. Who better to make the case to your existing agents that the grass is not greener somewhere else?

Most agents you hire will eventually leave. While you will hire some people for a lifetime career, it’s not a reasonable expectation for most of your agents.

It’s better to recognize the natural ebb and flow of an employment relationship and see someone leaving as an opportunity for a boomerang hire down the road.

In a post from the archive, Martin Seligman tells a remarkable story about optimism.

In the mid-1980s, 120 men from San Francisco had their first heart attacks.

Of the 16 most pessimistic men, 15 had died. Of the 16 most optimistic men, only 5 died. 

In response to this story, take a few minutes to consider what this research teaches about the importance of optimism.

Are you an optimistic person?

Do you seek to bring optimistic agents into your organization?

If you struggle with this issue, you may want to pick up a copy of Dr. Seligman’s classic book on this topic.

Optimism is critical to your personal well-being and your trajectory as a leader.

And according to Dr. Seligman, it can be learned.

Executive Coach Matthew Kimberly recently articulated the value of a business coach.

People, as a general rule, don’t hire coaches for information.

But the execution of the stuff is more important. You don’t fire your personal trainer after she shows you how to do a push up.

If part of your office’s value proposition is to provide coaching, you need to get really good at articulating its value.

Most agents don’t get it.

And they’ll continue to not get it unless you can demonstrate its value through stories, testimonials, and results.

If you can’t demonstrate the value of your coaching, remove it from your value proposition and focus on something else.

Otherwise, you’ll get stuck selling over-priced information.

As inventory levels remain at historic lows, agents who are able to generate listings are in a very desirable position.

Those who primarily work with buyers feel like they’re in purgatory.

So, who’s getting the listings?

According to Steve Murray, there’s one group of agents who are suffering more than others.

The top 20% of agents are growing their listing volume. This group is up 5% from historical levels.

New agents are also getting more listings because there are more of them (new agent hiring is up), and they’re capturing the “mom and dad” listings.

Both the high-performing agents and the new agents are taking listings from the mid-range performers and marginal/part-time agents.

The mid-range agents are the most vulnerable.

Your competitor’s mid-range agents are vulnerable from a recruiting perspective.

If you have a system or methodology for generating listings, there’s a high demand for what you’re offering.

Your mid-range agents are vulnerable from a retention perspective. 

Make a list of your agents who are capturing a lower number of listings in the last 18 months. You can bet their frustration level is high, and they may be looking elsewhere to get their problem solved.

Struggling agents want their pain taken away, and they’ll gravitate towards those who they believe can solve their problems.

I spoke with a broker-owner last week who does a great job of collecting hiring and retention data.

Anytime an agent leaves their company, they conduct an exit interview and question those close to the agent to document the reasons for the departure.

While a more advantageous financial package usually plays into the decision, it’s not the most common factor cited by the departing agent.

The most common reason:  I was not feeling to the group.  / I lost connection with the group

Perhaps this is rationalization—an agent may feel uncomfortable admitting to themselves they left for monetary reasons.

But even if this reason is not true, it’s still worth noting what agents are telling themselves when they leave.

Stories are powerful—especially the ones we tell ourselves.

It’s a worthy goal to build an office or team where this excuse could never be reasonably used.

It will increase your retention rate and make those agents who decide to leave even more uncomfortable with their decision.

In a post from the archive, Dave Mashburn reminds us about the importance of the Rosenthal Effect.

In the famous first study, Robert Rosenthal told a number of teachers that they had assessed all of the incoming 5th graders with a special new instrument designed to identify which children were poised to experience an intellectual “growth spurt” in the upcoming academic year.

In reality, these “high-potential” children were chosen at random, and there was nothing special about them at all.

By the end of the year, the majority of that group had, indeed, made the greatest strides among all the children, despite the fact that there was nothing different about those children, outside of having the highest expectations placed on them.

What did the teachers do differently with these students? 

They tended to downplay obstacles, show more positive patience and convey a strong confidence in their belief that these children would do well.

The children picked up on this positive expectation and lived up to the challenge of achievement.

As you reflect on the performance of your team and make plans for the second half of the year, it’s worth considering how to take advantage of the Rosenthal Effect.

Your new agent prospects need to hear how they have special talents that will help them excel in a real estate career.

Your experienced agent prospects need to hear how using their unique talents inside your system will produce remarkable results.

Your existing agents need to hear how you believe they’re on the verge of making significant breakthroughs in the second half of the year.

As a leader, setting high expectations and convincing others they’re capable of great things is one of the best investments you can make.

The CEO of Indeed, Chris Hyams, recently outlined the results of a wildly extensive hiring experiment conducted late last year.

During the experiment, Indeed engaged 2,600 employers and gave them $20M worth of free advertising.

This was not a simulation—more than 90,000 real interviews were conducted and 20,000 individuals were placed in new jobs.

The purpose of the experiment was to track how companies spent their time and resources during the recruiting process.

According to Chris, the results were surprising.

We found that 80% of recruiting effort and resources are spent in sourcing, screening, and scheduling.

Let that sink in.

Said another way; most of the expense in the recruiting process is spent just getting a prospect to an interview.

If you want to optimize your recruiting process, you must focus on the early stages of the process.

This is the stage where improvements produce the best returns.

Yesterday, we touched on the correlation between high performance and cognitive flexibility.

Researchers have concluded,

Cognitive flexibility provides a person with the ability to see that what they’re doing is not leading to success and to make the appropriate changes to achieve it.

Some people remain rigid and stick to the original plan, but more flexible people adapt to the unexpected event and problem-solve to find a solution.

How do you access if a recruiting prospect has a high level of cognitive flexibility?

Focus a few questions during the interview on this topic.

Are you the type of person who sticks to a plan or makes adjustments along the way?

When working with a difficult person, can you tell me about a time where you had to switch strategies to maintain the relationship and make progress?

If you want to grow in your own cognitive flexibility, here’s some good news: It’s a skill, and it’s something that can be learned.

Start by reading the second half of the reference article and visiting some of the linked resources.

Great leaders think on their feet and solve problems in many different ways.

Seeing you exercise this skill will inspire your agents to do the same with their clients.

For decades, the real estate industry has struggled with failed hires.

Hiring managers engage prospects with high hopes, but those hopes are often dashed soon after an agent begins their new career.

I’ve occasionally addressed this topic in previous posts and some of our clients have been successful in reducing their failed-hire rate by more than 50%.

How did they do it?  

Over time, they made small changes in their selection and onboarding process to improve their success rates.

Here is another small change to add to the list:

Start assessing for cognitive flexibility during your interviews.

Researchers Trevor Robbins, Annabel Chen and Zoe Kourtzi define cognitive flexibly this way.

Cognitive flexibility is a skill that enables a person to switch between different concepts, or to adapt behavior to achieve goals in a novel or changing environment.

Cognitive flexibility provides the ability for a person to see what they’re doing is not leading to success and to make the appropriate changes to achieve it.

It’s easy to see why this skill would be helpful to a new agent trying to learn real estate.

In our next Insight, we’ll learn how to assess for it in an interview and grow it in yourself and others.

Humans naturally want to avoid the mental disharmony they feel when new information is introduced that conflicts with their behaviors.

According to the AAMC, there are four ways individuals typically respond to cognitive dissonance:

Denying:  Insisting there is no difference between my beliefs and behaviors.

Modifying Reality: Yes, it appears there is a difference between my beliefs and behaviors, but you don’t understand my reality (ex. I don’t really work for that broker, I work for myself).

Rationalizing: Yes, there is a difference between my beliefs and behaviors, but there are things you don’t understand about my situation.

When you hear one or more of these responses, it should tip you off to what’s happening in the mind of your candidate.

Here’s the bad news:  When someone is experiencing cognitive dissonance, it’s very difficult to trust the person who’s challenging his or her beliefs.

The common strategies of adding more information to your side of the argument or demonstrating how the candidate is wrong will make the situation worse, not better.

In the short-term, it’s better to back off and do what you can to maintain the relationship.

Perhaps at some point in the future, the candidate will be intrinsically motivated to make a change.

At that point, you’ll be glad you fostered an open line of communication.

When a person is stuck in an unhealthy work routine, it can feel like a dark place.

And it becomes difficult for them to recognize the reality of their situation.

Your job as a hiring manager: Turn the lights on!

Researchers have discovered what tends to make a workplace a bright place.

We covered two factors yesterday, and here are two more:

Culture Fit. Performance and happiness at work are much higher when employees feel they fit within their organizational culture.

Not fitting in a job is like wearing the wrong clothes to a party—all the time. It’s hugely draining and de-energizing.

Shared Commitment. Commitment matters because it taps into the macro reasons of why you do the work you do.

Some of the underlying elements of commitment are perceiving you’re doing something worthwhile, having strong intrinsic interest in your job and feeling that the vision of your organization resonates with your personal purpose.

To turn the lights on, craft questions that uncover the unhappiness that a recruiting prospect may be experiencing.

Do you have good friends and colleagues at work who value you and how you contribute?

Do the goals and objectives of your broker resonate with your personal goals?

The research leads you to the place where the pain most likely exists.

The questions bring the pain to the surface.

Yesterday, we learned that unhappiness is a powerful catalyst for change.

According to researchers, here are two of the top five factors that contribute to happiness at work:

Contribution. This is meaningful work an agent does to benefit themselves and others in close proximity (both clients and teammates).

An agent who is contributing will have clear goals and will be making positive progress towards accomplishing them. They want to talk about issues that might prevent them from meeting their objectives and feel heard when they do so.

Resilience. This is the short-term motivation an agent feels when overcoming obstacles.

To be resilient, an agent needs encouragement to keep going even when things get tough. Companies with a sense of purpose and supportive resources create an expectation of high-performance.

During interviews or other recruiting conversations, ask questions that poke at these potential vulnerabilities.

What type of meaningful contribution are you making in your current job?

Do you have professional peers who are spurring you on to higher performance?

These questions (and others you may come up with on your own) will help uncover the unhappiness a person may be experiencing.

It’s the first step to making the grass look greener at your company.

For years, researchers have attempted to quantify what makes people happy in their jobs.

While it’s obvious this information would be helpful from a retention perspective, it’s something every recruiter would want to know as well.

Why?

Unhappiness is a powerful catalyst for change.

As humans, we become convinced the grass is greener on the other side by first becoming dissatisfied with our own grass.

Over the next few days, we’ll consider research conducted by the iOpener Institute for People and Performance.

In a study involving more than 9,000 people from around the world, the researchers investigated the characteristics of individuals who tend to be happy at work. Here is a quick summary.

People who are happy in their jobs…

 -are making a contribution.

-feel confident in their own abilities and the abilities of their teammates.

Each of these issues is a pathway to uncover dissatisfaction and unhappiness among your recruiting prospects.

And seeds of unhappiness eventually produce a harvest of recruiting success.

I often attempt to use data to make my point.

But according to Richard Millington, leaning too much on this tactic may limit my effectiveness.

A typical mistake is to try and convince people by finding the ‘right facts’.

The (sad) reality is if the recipient is resistant to the idea, they just dismiss or disagree with the facts.

What’s the alternative? Here are a few options:

Build relationships and be seen as a credible source. Information looks and feels different if it’s coming from someone a prospect trusts.

Tell a story that resonates with the prospect’s worldview. An effective story that is based upon emotions—emotions like fear, pride, and curiosity.

Use emotional statements or questions to make your point. Statements like: ‘This is what innovative companies like ours are doing.’ ‘You’ll be left behind if you don’t start adopting ____________.’  Or ‘Have you ever wondered why we have more $20M+ producers than anyone else in our marketplace?

There’s a time and place for facts, but they should only be part of your communication repertoire.

According to multiple studies, asking for referrals should be one of your most common recruiting activities:

• 82% of hiring managers rated recruiting referrals as generating the best ROI, above all other sources.
• Referred prospects are 55% faster to hire, compared with hires sourced through career sites.
• 88% of hiring managers said that referrals are the best source for above-average applicants. 

If you’re lagging behind in this area, here is a simple email/text script you can use to jump start your referrals:

Subject: Need Some Help

Hi [name],

I’m hoping you can help.

Is there anyone else you believe should be part of our team that isn’t today?

I’m looking for a couple of recommendations of agents you know or have worked within the last few months.

Anyone who you thought: “Wow, this agent really has their stuff together…”. Or, “I think I could learn a thing or two from that agent…”

Did anyone pop into your mind?

If so, just shoot me their name and how you know the person, and I’ll take it from there!

Thanks in advance for your help,

[name]

Don’t assume your agents will initiate referrals on their own.

To maximize this resource, you have to ask.