Last year, Jay Luebke published an article outlining his seven-year journey as a real estate agent (he started when he was 17-years old).

In his short career, he worked in four different brokerages in several different geographic markets.

According to Jay, here are just a few things that may be going through an agent’s mind when choosing a brokerage:

Do I need a robust training platform as I kick off my career as a new agent?

Am I in a new market where I need some help getting off the ground with leads?

Have I built a thriving business, honed my systems and now want the freedom to do what I want with little support from the brokerage?

Do I want an environment where I can create a passive stream of income by building a team?

And, there are a dozen more considerations.

As a recruiter or hiring manager, it’s important to recognize your company cannot possibly meet all the diverse needs of the prospective agent population.

It’s better to identify the two or three things you do better than any of your competitors.

Then, spend most of your time searching, finding, and connecting with agents or perspective agents who need the specific things you’re really good at providing.

This strategy is more expensive and time-consuming on the frontend, but it honors the integrity of both parties in the long run.

That makes for a better hire.

Today, I’d like to highlight a best practice developed by Tracy Dunne. Tracy manages the Anderson, OH office of Comey & Shepherd Realtors.

Tracy is one of the highest performing managers I’ve coached, and she’s developed a super simple way of setting her yearly goals.

She creates a one-page document that contains these headings:

Production Goals for the Office
Recruiting Goals for the Office
Re-Recruiting/Retention Goals for the Office
Coaching Goals for the Office
Enhancements/Technology Goals for the Office
Service to the Industry Goals for Tracy
Contributions to Company Advancement Goals for Tracy
Education/Certification/Professional Development Goals for Tracy
Gratitude Goals for Tracy
Personal Goals for Tracy

Under each heading, she puts two or three bullet points with action-oriented, yet measurable goals.

Here are some examples from last year’s plan (you can guess what categories they fit under):

Attend one law class each quarter
ROPED—recognize one per every day
De-recruit at least 3 low-performing agents
Develop a proposal for the office to become paperless
Send at least five thank-you notes per week
Declutter one space each month

At this time of year, Tracy pulls out her goal sheet and checks off items she has completed.

I’m always amazed how many of the things on my list have become a reality during the year.

In some strange way, the process of writing them is like planting the seeds that grow into accomplishments later in the year.

As you guessed, the hard part is formulating and writing down the goals in the first place.

Yesterday, we discussed the importance of self-disclosure for moving relationships past the acquaintance stage.

The middle ground between a positive connection and a hiring commitment is, in essence, a business friendship.

According to researchers, business friendships follow a predictable pattern:

Workplace friendships experienced three primary transitions: from acquaintance‐to‐friend, friend‐to‐close friend, and close friend‐to‐almost best friend.

The acquaintance-to-friend transition is caused primarily by working together in close proximity, sharing common ground, and extra‐organizational socializing.

There is nothing too surprising here. Most real estate hiring managers are trying to accomplish these tasks, and some do it quite successfully.

The problem? They stop at this stage and never reap the reward of going just a little bit further.

What’s the “bit further” secret sauce?

Solving problems together.

The friend-to-close friend transition was associated primarily with solving problems in one’s personal and work experiences. Communication at this transition became broader, more intimate, and less cautious.

This subtle change could be easily overlooked, but it demonstrates the connection between problem-solving and increasing the depth of a workplace relationship.

Increasing the depth of the relationship makes hiring seem like the natural next step.

In the quaint beach town of Stony Brook, New York, Dr. Art Aron and his wife Elaine (also a psychologist), head a laboratory that studies relationships.

Through a series of experiments involving strangers who volunteered for the research (think speed-dating with a little more structure), Dr. Aron discovered something interesting:

The type of questions you ask someone when you first meet makes a big difference in how the relationship forms.

More specifically, if your questions (and the questions of the other person) involve just factual information, the relationship will probably not progress past acquaintance level.

This is commonly called “small talk,” and it involves asking questions such as:

What do you do for a living?

How long have you worked in that line of business?

Are you planning on taking a vacation this summer?

By contrast, if the questions asked during the initial interaction are slightly more personal and involve a small amount of self-disclosure, the relationship progresses differently.

Here are some examples of questions involving more self-disclosure:

What would constitute a perfect day for you?

For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

If you could wake up tomorrow having gained one quality or ability, what would it be?

It may take a little practice, but a good conversationalist can work these types of questions into a business exchange.

What’s the purpose of doing this?

According to Dr. Aron, this small change makes a big difference when it comes to moving relationships beyond the acquaintance stage.

The Job Board Doctor consulting group recently released their annual recruiting trends survey.

This is one of the longstanding benchmarks for the recruitment advertising marketplace and something many recruiting marketing professionals reference to apportion their budgets.

Each year, they track the media sources that produce the highest volume of recruiting prospects and the highest quality of recruiting prospects.

This year’s highest volume sources are:

1. Job Alerts (Text or Email)*
2. Search Engine Optimization Strategies
3. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

This year’s highest quality sources are:

1.  Job Alert (Text or Email)
2. Search Engine Optimization Strategies
3. Google’s Job Search Box

To successfully play the candidate sourcing game, you must use paid advertising (job alerts and PPC) and understand how to optimize search engines.

The fact is–most companies get stuck with a low volume of low-quality prospects when sourcing online, and a few companies capture the higher volumes of high quality applicants.

Make sure you’re in the second group.

*What’s a Job Alert? A Job Alert is an email/text notification that is sent to you whenever jobs matching your search preferences are available on a particular site.

At the gym, personal trainers will remind you that strengthening your core is the foundation of any successful fitness program.

According to Dr. Paul Stoltz, strengthening your CORE is also essential for improving your resilience.

But in Dr. Stoltz’s vernacular, CORE is a helpful acronym for describing how you interpret and process adversity.

Control: This is the degree to which you believe you can influence whatever happens next.

Ownership: This is the likelihood you will take action to make a situation better.

Reach: This is the degree to which adversity spills over into other aspects of your life.

Endurance: This is your staying power to outlast a negative set of circumstances.

In simple terms, your resilience muscle gets stronger when you learn to proactively recognize and reframe the adversity coming your way.

Training your mind to reframe circumstances (in real time) sets you free to take the appropriate actions needed to address the situation and reduce your negative stress.

From the outside, this looks like resilience in the face of adversity.

But from the inside, this way of thinking makes you feel centered, focused, and less stressed.

Using your phone as a tool for recruiting is becoming increasingly difficult.

According to researchers, people have stopped answering their phones because of the high volume of machine-based fraudulent calls.

In the United States alone, over four billion spam calls were placed to mobile phones in the last year.

This means over 40% of all calls to mobile phones are initiated by machines and robots.

And here’s the surprising part—the rate of unwanted calls was only 3.7% in 2017.

Why the drastic increase?

Because scammers are getting better at tricking people to answer their phones through techniques such as “neighborhood spoofing” where the inbound caller ID looks similar to your phone number.

Once burned, twice shy.

Unless the call is from someone who is a known contact, many people are choosing not to answer.

It’s important to diversify your recruiting techniques as the technology landscape changes.

In a recent blog post, Mark Johnson describes a productivity obstacle that trips up many real estate managers.

There is a difference between being in motion and taking action. They sound similar, but they’re not the same.

When you’re in motion, you’re planning, strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result.

Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome.

As you might have guessed, most people prefer motion over action.

Why?

We prefer motion because it allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure or criticism.

Fear of failure is a powerful force keeping many would-be high performers from finding success.

The outward symptom is busyness, but the underlying cause is usually fear.

Newton’s first law of physics informs us that a body at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force.

New research on the behaviors of recruiting prospects tells us something similar:

Most workers do not anticipate changing positions/companies in the next year.

59% of individuals plan to stay in their current role indefinitely.

14% of individuals plan on leaving their current role in less than 6 months.

While this research was not uniquely focused on the real estate industry, it tells us something about how humans look at employment—86% are “at rest.”

There are two takeaways for hiring managers and recruiters:

1. Recruiting prospects move when they’re “acted upon by an external force.”  You’re the external force.

2. It takes time and nurturing to get recruiting prospects moving. If you view the recruiting process with a 6 to 12-month window in mind, you’ll increase your prospect pool by nearly 200%.

Like the laws of physics, the laws of recruiting can’t be ignored.

Seth Godin recently surmised:

It feels safer to say that we’re born with talents and gifts, that we have a true calling, that we’re looking for what connects with our passion.

That’s not useful (because it means you spend a lot of time shopping around) but it’s also not true.

New research confirms that random choices lead to preferences, and then it follows that preferences lead to habits and habits lead us to become the person we somehow decide we were born to be.

So, if we’re not preprogramed to love a certain job, how do you find satisfaction in a career?

In short: If we commit to loving what we do, we’re more likely to find engagement and satisfaction. And if what we do changes, we can choose to love that too.

From a recruiting perspective, it’s a mistake to hire someone who is not willing to make a serious commitment to their career—both in general and in working with you.

You’re just sowing the seeds of dissatisfaction.

From a retention perspective, the agents who are struggling with dissatisfaction may be uncommitted or committed to the wrong things.

Fix the commitment issue and satisfaction will follow.

Every interview eventually comes to an end.

For most hiring managers, the last few minutes of the interview dissolves into a milk-toast exchange of pleasantries.

Prospect: Thanks for taking the time to meet with me today. I really enjoyed learning about all the great things you have going on here.

Hiring Manager: I really enjoyed meeting you too. I think you have a lot of potential.

The end of the interview is a great opportunity to make something happen—so don’t waste it.

Provide Options. Near the end, provide three options for moving forward. Ask the prospect to choose one of the options.

Humans don’t like to contradict themselves. Knowing they made a commitment to take the next step (and said it out loud to another person) makes it harder to quit or change their mind at a later date.

Uncover Obstacles. Once a prospect chooses his next step, ask the following question: Based on what we discussed today, is there anything that would keep you from moving forward with your next step?

If there are barriers to making progress, you want to address those before the prospect leaves the room. You won’t be there later to help them solve their problems.

By purposefully closing the interview, you can alter how a recruiting prospect remembers their interview and help them focus on the next step.
 

Appcast recently published their mid-year update on the state of recruitment advertising.

Here are some of the trends they documented:

1. Despite a high unemployment rate, cost per application (CPA) increased. Depending on the job position, it costs between $10 and $30 in raw advertising expense to get a recruiting prospect to apply. This is a 6.5% increase over the 2019 costs.

2. CPA increased in many of the states hit hardest by COVID-19. There is a surprisingly large variance in advertising costs by state. Many states in the Northeast are experiencing CPAs 30% to 90% higher than 2019 levels.

3. Lower candidate engagement influenced CPA. After initially viewing a job posting, more prospects than normal are dropping out of the recruiting process. Prospects seem less motivated to push the recruiting process to completion.

4. Mobile clicks increased, but many prospects were looking and not applying. If someone clicks on a job posting, the company posting the job pays for the click. Clicks without applies drive up costs.

These trends make it clear that recruitment advertising is very responsive to what’s transpiring in the economic, governmental, and social arenas.

It is easy to underperform and overspend without real-time performance metrics, responsive budget controls, and a willingness to change tactics quickly.

Like any fast-moving, tech-powered environment, it requires focus to win.

Yesterday, I highlighted the importance of assessing a candidate’s “self-awareness” during an interview.

An individual’s “awareness of others” is equally important, but it’s more difficult to detect.

Again, Dave Mashburn gives us some help on how to uncover this trait during an interview:

To access a candidate’s awareness of others, start by asking:

a. Can you give me some examples when you detected (through empathy or feeling) what someone else needed without them telling you directly?

Then change your line of questioning by asking:

b. How often do you seek out advice and input from others?

Follow-up with: Do you find it difficult to ask for help?

Being emotionally attuned to others is what causes us to recognize their wants, needs, and desires.

And awareness of others often goes hand in hand with an awareness of needing help from others.

Many researchers have documented how the traits of “self-awareness” and “awareness of others” correlate with success.

One of our clients recently asked: How do you assess for “self-awareness” during an interview?

In a post from our archive, Dave Mashburn provided a great answer to this question:

Self-aware people are open to feedback.

Ask the standard: “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” question during the interview.

When the candidate talks about their weaknesses, follow-up with this question:
“What are some of the things you’ve done to improve your weaknesses?”

Or, “What is your strategy for improving your __________ (earlier stated weakness)?”

This gets you past the canned answers and helps you discover if the candidate is working on getting better.

This information is important because a truly self-aware person wants to improve their weaknesses.

Tomorrow we’ll work on assessing for “awareness of others.”

Last week, I had the opportunity to connect with Tracey Velt from Real Trends.

For the past few months, Tracy has been interviewing real estate leaders and recording podcasts on how the Covid crisis has affected their companies, consumers, and agents.

This podcast is a quick listen (15 minutes) and covers a lot of ground concerning both recruiting and retention. A transcript is also provided if you’d rather read than listen.

Here are some of the topics covered:

1. How has recruiting changed due to Covid-19?

2. What are some strategies brokers and managers are finding effective in this type of market?

3.  What are some things brokers need in light of the new circumstances

4. Who’s been innovative and what are they doing to find success?

5.  What new opportunities are available and not being tapped.

If you take the time to listen, I think you will learn something and capture at least one take-away.