by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Getting the highest quality recruiting prospects to engage is a challenge.

This challenge often manifests itself by having to sort through a large number of low-quality leads to find the gems.

To solve this problem, some companies erect hurdles (request a lot of additional information) in the application process to deter or screen-out the wrong people from applying.

While this appears well-intentioned (I’ll weed out the unqualified and the uncommitted early in the process), it usually backfires.

It’s the quality recruiting prospects – those with ample experience and access to other opportunities – who will look at a lengthy apply process and realize that it’s not worth their time.

The higher the friction at the beginning of the process, the less applications you’re going to receive.

And those you do receive will be of lower quality.

It’s better to lower the hurdles during the attraction phase, and then weed out the unqualified during the engagement phase.

It’s a little more work at the beginning, but it ensures you’re capturing the highest quality prospects.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Some of the highest-performing individuals in the workforce are the most miserable.

In an insightful article in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson recently surmised that for the college-educated in the last decade, work has morphed into somewhat of a religious identity.

It promises identity, transcendence, and community, but for many individuals it’s failing to deliver.

There is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled.

But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.

This workforce trend is a gold mine for the real estate industry.

We know most agents enter the real estate industry as second or third career professionals (i.e. very few people start their work life in real estate).

We also know, the sweet spot for hiring new agents is probably in a prospect’s ‘30s or early ‘40s.

To have access to a large group of highly-educated individuals who are dismayed with their current jobs is like walking into an orchard at harvest time.

The pickings are good.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

You know you’re working a recruiting system when you start thinking about conversions.

By observing some of the best real estate hiring managers and recruiters over the last decade, I’ve noticed a conversion pattern has emerged.

If you identify 20 recruiting prospects (they self-identify through recruitment marketing or they fit an ideal prospect profile you’ve developed), you’ll need to have a preliminary recruitment-focused conversations with at least 12 of them.

If you have 12 conversations (email, text, or voice) with recruiting prospects, you should be able to schedule five interviews/face-to-face meetings.

If you schedule five interviews/face-to-face meetings, four of the interviews will actually happen.

If you conduct four interviews/face-to-face meetings, three will be worthy of moving into your recruitment funnel.

If you put three individuals into your recruitment funnel and follow-up properly, you’ll eventually hire one high-quality agent.

What are your recruitment process conversion metrics?  

If you don’t know, start measuring so you can benchmark yourself against those who consistently hire talented new agents.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

We’ve spent the last few days hypothesizing about ways to discover and optimize your employer brand.

But, crossing the divide between theory and practice can be a challenge.

Perhaps a good example from the real estate industry would help.

Bellwether Real Estate is a small brokerage in the Northwest and competes alongside some of the largest and most well-known real estate brands in the country.

Their employer brand message is simple, concise, and it’s consistent with who they are as a company.

Here are the components of their employer brand:

Personal Growth and Freedom

Awesome Relationships

Impacting the World

Take a look at Bellwether’s recruiting website and you’ll see how they weave these components into their story.

Developing and optimizing your employer brand is the first and perhaps most important component of an effective recruitment marketing strategy.

It’s worth the time and effort to help recruiting prospects get an attractive image of the real you.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

According to one of the top real estate executives in the country, you ask your agents.

A few months ago, Steve Brown of Crye-Leike sent a quick survey to his agents that contained the following questions:

Why did you join Crye-Leike?

Why do you stay at Crye-Leike?

The agents were asked to provide three one-word answers to each question (free-form, no drop-down menus or prompting). Some clear patterns emerged.

Agents joined Crye-Leike because of:

Reputation
Training
Convenient Location to an Office
Positive Connection with the Broker.

Agents stayed at Crye-Leike because of:

Support
Tools
Positive Connection with the Broker
Co-Workers Feel Like Family

Based on the feedback, Steve created word-clouds to visually demonstrate the results to everyone in the company. Poster-sized copies of the word-clouds were placed in each office.

“These word clouds are a snapshot of our DNA. They help us remember who we are when we recruit and train.”

This is a great example of how to discover your employer brand.

Employer brands can be changed and optimized over time, but you can’t set a new destination until you know where you’re starting.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

There are some common components to a recruitment strategy.

The first, and perhaps the most important, is your employer brand.

Sarah Lybrand, a contributor to the LinkedIn talent blog, provides a concise definition of employer brand:

Similar to the way a corporate brand works (which offers a value proposition to customers, defining products or services in the marketplace), an employer brand includes the market’s perception of your company as an employer, but also describes your promise (or employee value proposition) to employees in exchange for their experience, talents, contacts, or skills.

The definition includes two parts—the market’s perception of your company and your unique value proposition to the agents who join your team.

You may think you can craft an employee brand story in a conference room and announce it to the world to be consumed and believed.

It doesn’t work that way.

Since most real estate companies have prominent consumer brands (in the local market), the customers’ perception of your company will initially have a large and defining effect on your employer brand.

Is there a gap between the consumers’ perception of your brand with who you want to be as an employer?

Employer brands can and should change over time to meet market conditions.

But, brands are like large ships. Moving the rudder today will not produce an immediate and noticeable change in the eyes of your recruiting prospects tomorrow.

That takes some time.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Direct marketing techniques have been around for decades.

About 15 years ago, companies like HubSpot started modernizing direct marketing for the internet age.

New terms like “inbound marketing” were coined to differentiate the old from the new, but the underlying principles didn’t change.

When you’re selling something, it’s always better when a qualified prospect seeks you out, rather than the other way around.

The same is true for recruiting.

What is often called “inbound marketing” in sales is called “recruitment marketing” in the world of talent acquisition.

Driven by a sustained period of low unemployment, new companies, technologies, and techniques are now emerging in the arena of recruitment marketing.

In turn, recruiting prospects are being trained by the marketplace to interact with career opportunities like they do with product/service offerings.

In the days ahead, to be good at recruiting, you’ll need to be good at marketing.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Anglers often use “chumming” to catch fish in saltwater environments.

By putting small bits of food (chum) in the water, fish are drawn to the fisherman.

According to research on search behavior, the same thing may be happening with your company’s career site.

Most recruiting prospects start their search on Google, job-related search engines, or professional social networks.

By comparison, only 4% of prospects start their search on the career site of a specific company.

So, how do most people get to your career site?

After seeing a job opportunity on an external job board or career-related site, almost 70% report circling back and applying on a company’s career page.

To maximize the flow of recruiting prospects to your company, you’ll need a two-pronged strategy.

1. Put the Chum in the Water. Expose the job-search world to your recruiting brand and the opportunities in your company.
2. Proactively Fish for Those You Attract. Be ready to capture not only those who respond directly to a recruiting ad, but also those who visit your career page after searching.

The combination of these two strategies will significantly increase the flow of recruiting prospects to your company.

Just doing one or the other may leave you with an empty stringer.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Earlier this week, I briefly outlined some of the best practices for conducting video interviews.

I sketched-out a basic framework for an effective connection, but didn’t provide much detail on how the best interviews are actually conducted.

To provide more detail, I’m making our video interviewing template available for download.

This template was developed, tweaked, and continually updated many times during the process of conducting dozens of video interviews with live prospects. It was also tested with several different hiring managers.

You’ll find it flows smoothly and focuses on many of the important issues you’ll want to uncover during the interview.

It also provides some good questions for building rapport in the video chat environment.

Finally, we’re making it available in an editable format, so you can make your own improvements and adapt it for the needs of your organization.

Download it and give it a try.

Your first interview may feel a little awkward, but you’ll gain your stride quickly.

You’ll soon develop into a video interviewing pro.

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by Logan Dziuk, Recruitment Marketing Manager, ThirdPool Recruiting

If you were to draw a map of the typical candidate’s journey from the moment they began considering a career change up until the moment they arrived in your applicant tracking system or CRM, what would that path would look like?

Many of us assume this journey is linear. We think of an individual deciding one day to begin looking for a job, performing a Google search for jobs in their area, finding one of relative interest, and hitting the apply button.

This assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reality is that many recruiting prospects will make a dozen or more touches with your brand, or with the particular role, before they apply. This means postings ads to job boards alone is insufficient for an effective recruitment strategy.

Think of how many times you pick up your phone, browse Facebook, scroll through Instagram, or check LinkedIn over the course of a day. Social platforms like these are great resources to create potential touchpoints for potential candidates.

However, the proven source of the absolute highest quality candidates is your organization’s career site.

We recently conducted a study of a handful of top-producing real estate brokers and franchises in the country and found that, on average, candidates who applied via their career sites were 3 times more likely to have a productive interview than prospects who applied on a job board or through a social platform.

If you don’t already have a career page on your website, this is a must if you want to pursue active recruiting seriously. And, if you do have a career page, are you tracking its performance and optimizing the results?

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

I received a few questions about vendor recommendations for video interviews.

It’s surprising how many tools have popped up in the last few years, and it can take a while to research the pros and cons of each solution.

I found it helpful to separate the tools into two categories: 

Consumer-oriented services (WhatsApp, Facetime, Google Duo, Facebook Messenger, etc.)

Business-oriented services (Skype for Business, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, Join.me, etc.)

For video interviews, the business-oriented services performed better. 

The consumer-oriented services are generally optimized for mobile phones.

Our recruiters did the interviews at their desks, and the business-oriented services work better on a laptop or desktop.

Surprisingly, a majority of the recruiting prospects also preferred using laptops or desktops for the interviews.

You’ll save yourself some integration headaches by using one of the well-known business-oriented services.

We tried several of these services over a few months, and finally settled on Zoom.

Regardless of what you choose, it’s important you find a service that provides high-quality and simple-to-join meetings.

The technology integration should be the easy part. If it’s not, look for a different vendor.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Last year, we had the opportunity to manage a large recruiting project for a client on the West Coast.

The client’s offices were in Southern California and our recruiting team was in Seattle.

Because we operated remotely, video interviews were the only option available for connecting “face-to-face” with recruiting prospects.

During the engagement, our goal was to fill four interview slots each weekday.

We typically reached 75% of our goal and conducted about 70 interviews per month.

With lots of repetition, the best practices emerged.

The first and most important advantage of using video interviews was a higher interview rate (calculated as: total # of completed interviews/total # of recruiting prospects).

If your team is struggling with a low interview rate (anything below 15%), adding video interviews to your recruiting process will most certainly improve this metric.

More interviews usually lead to more and better hires.

Why better? As the post-interview pool increases, you have more choices and better information which allows you to be selective.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

There will always be obstacles to making quick connections with recruiting prospects.

Overcoming those obstacles is the hard work of recruiting.

While there is no holy grail, new tools and methodologies increase the percentage of effective connections. 

Texting

By itself, texting is not new. However, the comprehensive and systematic use of texting as a recruiting tool has become increasingly important.

Relying solely on phone calls and emails will limit your success because these mediums have such poor conversation rates.

Most high-performing recruiters have transitioned to using text as their first and primary form of communication. 

It’s now common for them to have hundreds of text conversations per week.

Video Interviews

Video chat is not new either, but its use in the recruiting process has become more popular in the last few years.

Also, video chat services are very affordable—access to a powerful suite of tools cost less than $15/month.

Nothing will replace the importance of a face-to-face interview, but video interviews allow you to connect with prospects that would otherwise be lost or unnecessarily delayed.

In the next Insight, I’ll cover some best practices of using video interviews in your recruiting process.

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by Logan Dziuk, Recruitment Marketing Manager, ThirdPool Recruiting

Here’s the scenario:

You’re a mid-to-large sized real estate brokerage with a few offices and a well-recognized brand in your local community. You have a good-looking career site and leverage the traffic coming to your website from your real estate customers.

You have no problem generating recruiting leads, but much to your frustration, most of them don’t respond to your calls or emails.

The problem?

Emails are often impersonal and rarely opened. Phone calls are usually ignored because of the increasing number of robo-calls and scams.

How can you engage and connect with recruiting prospects who have demonstrated interest with your employer brand but don’t answer your calls or emails?

Simple, send them a text message.

Recent data gathered from our own clients and partners indicates that text messaging yields an open rate of 98% compared to emails which are opened only 22% of the time.

Moreover, in virtually all of the case studies with our real estate clients, text messages produced an initial response rate of nearly 60%.

The response rate for a recruiting email (depending on a few factors) hovers close to 10%.

Text messages are also much easier to compose than emails, saving you time during the initial stages of the recruiting process.

The key to using text messaging in your recruiting engagement is to make sure you have gained permission from recruiting prospects to send them texts. This could be as simple as displaying a disclaimer on the application or contact form hosted on your website.

Once you’ve done this, the doors are open for you to create a positive, trusting relationship with more candidates.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Making quick connections with recruiting prospects is critical in today’s tight labor market.

Both new agents and experienced agents have many employment choices.

The first battle you must win is for the attention and mindshare of the high-quality prospect.

Perhaps you believe a quick response communicates weakness or desperation.

I recently heard a hiring manager say,

“If individuals want to work on my team, they’ll have to pursue me, jump through some hoops, and demonstrate they’re serious.”

This kind of bravado leads to only one thing–a shortage of prospects.

And a shortage of prospects is the main contributor to poor hiring decisions.

You can always be more selective later in the recruiting process. Saying “no” once you have a more complete picture is appropriate and necessary.

However, inadvertently turning talented individuals away early will rob you of the opportunity to say “yes” when it really matters.

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