by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

The general manager of a large real estate company told me about an informal experiment he has been running for the last 30 years.

Every time he sits down at a restaurant, he tries to take note of the topics the four closest tables are discussing.

The results have been consistent–1 in 4 tables are talking about some kind of real estate / housing topic.

Knowing that 25% of the population is conversing about real estate issues motivates him to stay engaged in the game—there are business opportunities all around him!

He and his business partners have used this motivation to build one of the largest and most productive real estate companies in the country.

Quick question:  How many of those four tables are talking about jobs/employment related issues?

I haven’t done 30 years of informal research yet, but I suspect it’s more than 25%.  

Employment is one of the most common topics people talk about with friends and family.

As a real estate recruiter/hiring manager, you’re at the intersection of two of the most “talked about” topics in our society. 

Like real estate–there are recruiting opportunities all around.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Traditional recruiting wisdom tells us we should focus most of our hiring efforts on younger candidates.

We’re told these individuals are best suited to adapt to rapid technological changes, and they’ll be most successful at connecting with the next generation of buyers/sellers.

While these are valid points, the broader employment world (outside of real estate) is starting to challenge this traditional wisdom.

Harvard Business Review recently reported,

More and more Americans want to work longer — or have to, given that many aren’t saving adequately for retirement.

Soon, the workforce will include people from as many as five generations ranging in age from teenagers to 80-somethings.

The tight labor market is accelerating these changes (seniors are now working fast food jobs), but there are some underlying realities that could have some very positive long term affects:

Today’s older adults are generally healthier and more active than those of generations past, and they are changing the nature of retirement as they continue to learn, work, and contribute.

In the workplace, they provide emotional stability, complex problem-solving skills, nuanced thinking, and institutional know-how.

Their talents complement those of younger workers, and their guidance and support enhance performance and inter-generational collaboration.

In light of these changes, the average age of real estate agents may start to increase.

Would that be a bad thing?

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

One of the prime benefits of working as a real estate agent is freedom from the daily commute.

Of course, real estate agents still spend a lot of time in their cars. However, they often have the flexibility to set their own schedules and escape rush hour stress.

To many workers in today’s job market, this is a significant benefit.

How significant?

A recent study found that a 20-minute increase in commute time is equivalent to getting a 19% pay cut for job satisfaction.

Who’s affected most?

Commuting stress disproportionately affects millennials (they often have to commute further to afford housing) and female workers (they place higher value on work-life balance).

During your next interview with a new-to-real-estate candidate, ask about his/her commute.

You may not only uncover a high level of dissatisfaction, but also find a problem that working as a real estate agent could easily solve.

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by Logan Dziuk, Candidate Sourcing Coordinator, ThirdPool Recruiting

The candidate experience has become significantly more critical in the world of recruiting, particularly within real estate.

If we look at consumer marketing, everything is built and framed around the customer experience. With recruiting, it’s no different.

Whereas consumer marketing has customers, recruitment marketing has candidates.

As job opportunities begin to outpace the labor supply, the candidate experience you deliver to your recruiting prospects becomes even more vital to your organization’s success.

Think about your recruiting process from the candidate’s perspective.

Try searching for your job openings as if you were the job-seeker. As you go through your process, ask yourself questions such as:

Am I able to find my open positions easily?

Is the job description informative and easy to read?

Is it accessible via a mobile device?

Is it simple to apply or is it cumbersome and lengthy?

The answers to those questions will help you identify areas of potential improvement and growth within your application process. Consumer marketing has been asking these sorts or questions for a while. It’s time we start asking them too.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

There is an old saying in real estate recruiting: You have to kiss a lot of frogs in order to find the one who’s a prince.

Since no one likes to kiss frogs, there’s a temptation to let impersonal technology systems do the kissing for you.

Sounds like a great idea, but here’s the problem:

High performers hate kissing soulless technology systems as much as you hate kissing frogs.

When a cold, automated engagement disappoints a high-performer, they hop away with all the other frogs who were so efficiently rejected.

This is a great example of being efficient, but not effective.

There may be a day when artificial intelligence and virtual humans replace real recruiters, but we’re not even close yet.

The best recruiters do it the old fashioned way, and periodically experience the storybook ending.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

“I could see myself working here.”

If one of your candidates says this (verbally or to themselves), he/she has a very high chance of leaving their current position/career field and coming to work for you.

Of the 667 coefficients in the University of Calgary study, this factor was most predictive of whether a person would change jobs.

Naturally, it should be a primary focus in your recruiting process.

How do you get a person to experience perception of fit?

The researchers gave us some clues on where to focus:

Applicants [evaluate] the characteristics of the job, organization, and recruiter in light of their own needs and values to determine fit.

Spend some time during the initial interview and subsequent follow-up conversations trying to get the candidate to express their needs and articulate their values.

Once these issues are out in the open, the fit (or the misfit) will often become obvious.

Your job is not to create the fit, but instead bring to light if it already exists.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

In 2005, Derek Chapman and several of his colleagues from the University of Calgary published the results of research they’d been working on for the past few years.

The topic of the project was recruiting, and the purpose of the research was to uncover insightful connections among 71 recruiting-related research studies published over the previous five decades.

While conducting this type of research may sound mind-numbing to most of us, the results should energize anyone who is trying to be successful at hiring agents.

After analyzing 667 different coefficients effecting the recruiting process,  the research revealed the six most important factors effecting recruiting outcomes:

1. Position Characteristics:  Is this job something I want to do?

2. Recruiter Characteristics: Do I like the recruiter/hiring manager?

3. Perception of the Recruiting Process:  How long/difficult is the recruiting process?

4. Perceived Alternatives: What other options are available?

5. Hiring Expectations:  What are the chances of me getting/being successful in this job?

6. Perception of Fit:  Is this job something that fits my personal needs, values, strengths, and hopes for the future?

We’ll discuss these issues more in future Insights, but do a quick inventory of the interactions with your recruiting prospects.

Are these the topics you’re addressing during your recruiting process?   They’re likely the issues your candidates are considering.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Here’s a simple principle of marketing in the digital world: to be found by consumers, you must be visible in places where they’re searching.

Google built one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world on this ingenious idea, and the “search mentality” has now become the habit of most everyone who uses the internet.

The world of recruiting has been roped into this mentality as well. The consumers are candidates and the products are jobs.

This sounds like an efficiency match made in heaven, but there’s a problem. No one can agree on what to call the products (jobs). It quickly becomes a mishmash of ambiguity.

As a hiring manager, your goal is to get noticed by the right people. Here are some thoughts on how to make that happen more effectively.

Candidates are Searching for…

There’s a lot of job-related search data available from various companies and consultants. Here is one example recently published by Monster.com:

These are the most common job-titles in the minds of job-seekers. The first step to being found by the right people is understanding how candidates view themselves (“I see myself as a _______.”)

Connecting Your Job to How People Search

If you want to hire real estate agents, you could place an ad for a “real estate agent.”  This may be the most direct way to communicate your desires to a group of people searching for jobs.

The problem? Your way of describing your job is not in the minds of the candidates. It only shows up in 1% of the searches.

By contrast, you’d have many more candidates (14 times more) looking for your job with various position titles and descriptions if you were hiring an administrative assistant (highlighted in gray).

Why do more people search with administrative-related words more than real estate-related words? Who knows. The facts are—they do it. As recruiters, it’s important to acknowledge this reality and respond appropriately.

Deception or Enlightenment?

One way to respond is to craft job postings more closely resembling the key words people use in their internet searches.

For example, candidates often search for marketing positions (#9 on the list). Since real estate agents perform many marketing tasks in their jobs, a job title such as Real Estate Marketing Specialist could be used to describe (in search terms) the real estate agent position.

Some people view this methodology as deceptive. I would challenge you to view it as enlightening.

The world of internet search has forced us to communicate in single words, abbreviations, and short phrases. This works when describing a pizza, but can create confusion when defining something as complex as an employment opportunity.

You could retreat and let the world of search define your company and your recruiting language. Or, you can leverage this framework to educate and enlighten job-seekers about the complexities of the real estate industry and working as a real estate professional.

Hopefully, you’ll choose the second option. The real estate industry has a lot to offer, and most people don’t know much about the possibilities that exist.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Even if you’re not a football fan, you probably noticed the NFL season is starting to ramp up again.

The NFL marketers are masters at drawing attention to their sport. They have learned to turn seemingly uninteresting parts of the football business into revenue producing activities. The draft (held a couple of months ago)  is one part of the year-round drama.

For the average fan, the draft may seem uninteresting. However, it may be the most helpful and instructive part of the NFL season for a real estate hiring manager.

Maybe none of you will be throwing passes anytime soon, but you will be interviewing candidates and making hiring decisions on a regular basis.

What can the NFL draft teach you about hiring new agents? Maybe more than you think.

You Need Talent to Win

The NFL is about winning. Winning games. Making it to the playoffs. Winning the Super Bowl.

Your business is about winning too. There are a finite number of transactions happening in your marketplace. If you don’t get them, your competitors will. You win; they lose (or visa-versa).

If the playing field is level, the team with the most talented individuals usually wins.

Granted, that’s not always the case. But, the inverse is almost always true. Without talent on your team, it is nearly impossible to win.

Picking Winners is Really Difficult

NFL teams know the importance of talent and they put a lot of effort and attention into making the right choices. Teams generally employ seven or eight full-time scouts for the purpose of finding and evaluating up-and-coming players.

What’s their success rate? 

Typically, about 15% of players drafted will become sustained starters in the NFL.  In this year’s draft of 253 players, only 38 will make long-term contributions to their teams.

Considering the average NFL career lasts only 3.3 years and there are 32 teams all trying to fill 53-man rosters, there’s a lot of pressure to find those 38 players who will make it.

Accept the Odds – Play the Recruiting Game

This may surprise you, but your odds of hiring new long-term sustainable contributors for your real estate business is similar to what that NFL experiences in their hiring. In fact, for many of the companies we’ve evaluated, it’s worse.

How do you win at this game? You keep playing.

On average, each NFL team drafted eight players this year knowing only one or two will make it.

They don’t complain about how much work it is to find and hire those eight players.

They don’t attempt to hire less (pack up after the first couple of rounds of selections) thinking they can do a better job at selection than their competitors.

They don’t give up on new talent and fully depend upon trading for proven players.

They accept the odds and do their best to play the recruiting game with passion, focus, and attention to detail.

Successful hiring managers do the same.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

Sometimes small changes produce big results. Active listening is one of those changes.

If you want to increase the percentage of your interviews resulting in hires, this is the most important change you can make to your personal recruiting methodology.

Perhaps you’ve started to (1) control your mental presence, (2) resist the temptation to speak, and (3) pay attention to your listening posture. If so, your interactions with others are already improving. People love to be on the receiving end of this type of attention.

Some of you sent me stories last week on what you’ve learned about listening better during interviews. Keep them coming—they’re fun and interesting to read!

Today, we’ll finish up this topic. And, I’ve saved the best techniques for last.

What is Active Listening? (Continued)

Eye Contact. As you might expect, eye contact relates to listening posture. However, it gets its own mention because it’s so powerful. Researchers consistently demonstrate that simply “holding someone’s gaze” increases feelings of warmth, respect, and cooperation.

Don’t overdo it (you’re not on a romantic date), but regularly looking into your candidate’s eyes during the interview will result in a better connection.

Restating. Up until now, we’ve just considered silent listening techniques. At some point in the conversation, you’re going to have to say something (otherwise, it’s just passive listening).

Active listening involves some back and forth. But what do you say, and how do you say it? Dr. Friedman encourages us to use the same tools therapists utilize when listening to a patient.

Repeating another person’s words doesn’t just help ensure you’ve heard correctly—it allows the speaker to get a better sense of how he or she is coming across. 

It’s why therapists use this method so often; simply hearing our sentiments reflected back at us gives us a sense of clarity we would not otherwise have.

During the interview, frequently use the phrase: “So, what you’re saying is…”

For example, if someone is telling you about his commuting frustrations, you might say, “so, what you’re saying is you don’t like spending two hours a day in the car just getting to and from work.”

Validation. The final component of active listening is the trickiest to implement.  Validation means to actively connect to a person’s feelings by sharing a little bit of your own perspective.

For example, if a candidate is expressing frustration concerning the relationship she has with her boss, you might say, “I had a supervisor like that once. It drove me crazy to be around that person.”

This simple and quick validation (don’t go into a long story of your own) assures the candidate that what she’s feeling is not wrong or inappropriate.

What’s likely to happen [next] is your [candidate] will reflect on her words and clarify what she meant, without you having devalued her perspective.

The risk in using this technique is that you might be tempted to over share.  Remember, active listening is about listening—not talking. 

Applying Active Listening in Your Interviews

So, you now have six active listening techniques you can apply during your interviews.

Make a list of these skills and review them during or before you start to engage a candidate.

Grade yourself after the interview to see how you did. Better yet, invite someone to sit in on a few interviews and grade you on these factors. Holding yourself accountable is the only way you’ll improve.

If you master this way of communicating, there is a huge payoff. The number of your interviews resulting in hires will increase significantly. This stuff works every time it’s tried.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

In a recent blog, we discovered an important principle:

The most effective hiring managers tend to be those who are the most influential during the interview.

Researchers tell us that for infrequent face-to-face meetings (like an interview or an interaction with a sales person), listening is the best way to build trust and create influence.

Being a good listener sounds easy enough. Why don’t more of us do it if it produces such great results?

It’s because active listening is not normal listening. It’s a special type of listening reserved for the most effective communicators.

What’s Normal Listening?

To understand this concept, we’ll again lean on Dr. Ron Friedman’s thoughts on this topic.

Passive listening is what your do when you’re attending a conference or taking in a television show at the end of the day.

Selective listening is the type of listening you do when a colleague stops to tell you about the traffic jam he had to endure on the way to work. You’re tuning in and out just long enough to convince him you’re paying attention.

Both passive and selective listening are a far cry from the form good therapists use, which is called active listening.

Effective hiring managers act more like therapists when they’re doing interviews. Their focus is on building rapport and making a strong connection with the candidate.

What’s Active Listening?

The best way to understand active listening is to break it down into components.

We’ll cover three active listening components today and three in our next blog post.

1. Mental Presence. Being fully engaged on what is being said is the first component of active listening.

Your focus is placed entirely on what’s being said—not what you’ll say in response, or that important conference call you’ll have in an hour, or what you’re having for lunch….

Since workplace conversations often have two modes (talking and waiting to talk), it’s impossible to absorb the full meaning behind a speaker’s words when you’re mentally composing your next lines.

Stay completely focused on what your candidate is saying and let it fully sink into your mind.

2. Resisting the Temptation to Speak. Maintaining this type of focus is surprisingly difficult.

Dr. Friedman reminds us: This aspect of active listening means you don’t finish the other person’s sentences. Avoid making jokes. Never interrupt, even if it’s to agree.

You’ll know you’re making progress if you feel like you want to say something, but you don’t give into that urge.

3. Listening Posture. When you’re in the presence of a good listener, you can tell there’s more going on than just the exchange of words.

People relay they care about what’s being said through their body language.

When people are eager to hear more, they lean forward. A tilt of the head is associated with interest and curiosity. Head nodding can be a powerful sign of encouragement, especially when the speaker is expressing a difficult emotional point.

Start trying to use these techniques today. If you don’t have an interview scheduled, practice on your friends and family members.

This is a way of life for high-performing hiring managers. It’s the defining element of how they communicate. Since it doesn’t come naturally, it’s something you’ll have to nurture and practice to become good at doing.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

The initial face-to-face interview is an important factor in the hiring process. If the first interview goes well, the rest of the hiring interactions feel like they’re flowing downhill.

Do you think you’re effective at conducting interviews?

Most real estate managers believe this is one of their strengths. But, the recruiting performance metrics our company collects paints a different picture.

By isolating the interview component of the hiring process (through workflow design and software tracking), we’ve documented that successful interviewers experience much better recruiting results than those who are struggling.

How much better?  It’s often two to three times more hires.

Of course this begs the question—what are successful managers doing during their interviews that make them so effective?

Research suggests it really boils down to one thing.

Learning from Research on Sales

In his outstanding book, The Best Place to Work, Dr. Ron Friedman addresses the issue of building trust in the sales process.

Consider the quandary faced by car salesmen, a profession that according to a 2012 Gallup poll is squarely at the bottom when it comes to perceived honesty and ethical standards.

What can a car salesman say to make himself more convincing? The answers, according to [researchers], is quite literally nothing.

Dr. Friedman goes on to outline two studies showing it’s not an ability to talk that leads to sales. It’s quite the opposite.

The ability to be quiet and listen effectively is the defining characteristic of high performing sales people.

For Complex Sales, Listening is Even More Important

Selling a car is a simple sale. What happens when things get more complex? Of course, the sales prospect would need additional information to make a good choice. Right?

In the financial services industry, a job where advisors are explicitly hired for their knowledge and ability to give advice, surely there would be a connection between skillful talking and success.

Dr. Friedman sites another study showing the opposite to be true.

“The higher financial advisers scored as listeners, the better their clients rated them on quality, trust, and satisfaction. Effective listeners were also more successful at minimizing their customers’ perceptions of financial risk, making them more likely to invest in the future.”

Naturally, this translated into higher sales with the clients, but researchers also found it had an unexpected effect.

[Effective listening] had sown the seeds for an upward cycle of sales. That’s because the more an advisor listened, the more their clients wanted to recommend them to their friends. 

Listeners had created a defacto sales force. They weren’t the only ones focused on growing their business. So were their customers.

Listening Creates Influence

Exercising influence is the common thread among these research studies.

Those who have learned to listen effectively have much more success than those who are seemingly gifted talkers.

This principle applies to recruiting (and specifically interviewing) because the goal is to positively influence a person’s career decisions.

The hiring managers who make the most hires are those who are the most influential during the interview.

In the next blog post, we’ll discuss what it takes to become an effective listener.  Keeping your mouth shut during the interview is only the first step.

The rest of the process requires some attention to detail, but it’s work that will produce a high return on your investment.

It will move you into the group of hiring managers who hire more than 30% of the individuals they interview.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

At a recent Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices conference, I heard one of the speakers remind me of something I’ve read hundreds of times in articles, books, and speeches on success.

Everything in business operates on the indisputable law of the farm.

Seeds must be planted and nurtured in order to experience a harvest.

Surprisingly, this principle was recently on display in Death Valley. This desert, spanning parts of California and Nevada, is one of the hottest and driest places on earth. It’s not a place that would seem likely to support much plant life.

And yet, it wonderfully demonstrates the power and resilience of the law of the farm.  It also teaches an important lesson about recruiting—one that most hiring managers are very resistant to apply.

Death Valley Wildflowers

Death Valley recently experienced a remarkable harvest of wildflowers as documented by health and science reporter, Katherine Ellen Foley.

[Due to El Niño rains,] the suddenly fertile desert is fostering an explosion of wildflowers, unofficially coined a “super bloom.”

These super blooms happen about once every 10 years; the last ones in 2005 and 1998 were also due to an El Niño weather pattern….  

As you might imagine, the right set of circumstances have to be present for the super blooms to happen.

Though [park] visitors may not be able to see the seeds, they’re there for years and decades, on or near the surface, waiting for the right dose of rainfall.

Once the perfectly preserved seeds experience the right growing conditions (which only happens rarely) the harvest is unstoppable.

The Need for Seeds

Just as quickly as the wildflowers blossom, they get to work on producing the seeds for the next generation.

“When we have a big flower year like this, all these flowers are setting seeds,” says Linda Slater, a spokesperson for Death Valley National Park….

Currently, 20 species of wildflowers are in bloom, the majority ephemerals, which have short, deliberate lives. They blossom quickly, and generate seeds before the dry heat stifles them once more.

Without a huge number of seeds being present, used, and replenished, the cycle of life would quickly break down.

Are You Generating and Planting Enough Seeds to Make Your Recruiting Process Flourish?

This simple concept taught by nature is so often a challenge for hiring managers.

A harvest of new agents only comes reliably from one source—planting a large number of seeds on a consistent basis.

Yes, those seeds need nurturing. But the nurturing of a candidate is only partially in your control.

What if a candidate takes another job, moves out of the area with a spouse, or suffers an illness that keeps them from pursuing a real estate career?

More seeds are the only solution.

What happens when all the right conditions converge on your work of planting hundreds of recruiting seeds (this happened in 2013 and 2014 for many of our clients in the real estate industry)?

You get what the park rangers in Death Valley call a super bloom.  The short video on this phenomenon is worth seeing. However, it’s more important to start acknowledging and participating in the law of the farm as it applies to recruiting.

If you’re not planting enough seeds, you have no chance of harvesting a productive crop of new-to-real estate agents.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

For many of us, it initially feels uncomfortable to see recruiting inside the continuous improvement (CI) framework. That’s to be expected because change is difficult and the way to breakthrough performance follows a path outside our normal way of thinking.

The CI framework is a new way of thinking and it will drive a new set of behaviors related to recruiting activities. You can’t turn recruiting into a dependable business process unless you’re able to identify the right things to do (that’s the hard part) and to consistently get those things (new tasks) done.

An abbreviated version of CI will get you started quickly. Follow these six steps and you’ll be on your way to creating a recruiting process you can depend upon.

The Abbreviated Version of CI

To fully understand the CI process would take months of focused study. There are lots of great resources on this topic, and I would encourage additional study if you have the time and interest.

If you don’t want to invest this time, there is an abbreviated version that Dan Stull presented at an Edge Conference recently. Here are some of the basic concepts of CI:

Measure Outcomes.  Since you now see recruiting as a system, the components of the system become more visible. For example, a face-to-face interview is a component of most recruiting systems. Each component produces an outcome. These outcomes can be measured in various ways. For example, did an interview happen, what percentage of candidates completed interviews, what percentage of candidates committed to licensing school, etc. It would be typical for a recruiting process to have more than 20 outcomes.

Measure Elapsed Times.  Time is a measurable component of most outcomes. It’s important to measure the time it takes to get an outcome, but even more important to measure the time between desirable outcomes. For example, it would be important to measure how long it takes for a person to complete the real estate licensing requirements. It would also be important to measure how long it takes for the average person to start the licensing process.

Measure Where You’re Investing Time. The recruiting system does not just happen by itself. It moves forward on the energy you and others dedicate to the process.  Unless it’s documented and measured, your time will naturally be spent on low return activities. This was one of Deming’s greatest insights. Humans are notoriously poor at managing focus and recognizing what produces results.

Identify Non-Value Added Process Steps. As you discover the components of your recruiting system, constantly ask yourself: “Why are we doing this?”  “What would happen if we stopped doing it?” Most systems need pruning before they can be rebuilt with the right activities. Eliminate the tasks that don’t add value.

Measure Improvements. For recruiting systems, most leaders never get to this step. Why? They only measure one thing—the number of hires. Since the hire takes so long to materialize (often months), the connection between the outcome and the process is lost. This is why it’s so important to identify many short term outcomes (step one) that can be measured quickly.

Repeat Continuously. The continuous part of CI means repeating these fives steps over and over. You’re never done fixing your recruiting system.

Your end goal is to create a recruiting system producing consistent and reliable results. As Peter Drucker once famously said, “A well-managed factory is boring.  Nothing exciting happens in it because all the crises have been anticipated and converted into routine.”

You’ll know you’ve arrived when your hired report is the most boring document you review each month.

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by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting

In our last discussion, we learned that business processes with low variability are inherently more valuable.

If your company’s recruiting process produces a consistent and reliable flow of high-quality hires it’s, by nature, more valuable. This is tangible value and translates directly to real revenue and profits.

If you’re contributing to the reliable nature of your company’s recruiting process, you’re creating value. In turn, you’re also making yourself valuable to your company.

This all sounds great, but how do you get there?  To answer this question, we’ll take a page from history and retell a story of great achievement.

The Birth of the Continuous Improvement Movement

As a result of World War II, the Japanese economy was completely destroyed (along with most other economies around the world). During the ensuing Allied Forces occupation, Japan made progress toward recovery, but had a long way to go at the start of the new decade.

And then something remarkable happened.

A middle-aged engineer arrived in Japan to help the US government conduct a census. In the process of conducting his work, he started teaching Japanese business leaders to use statistical sampling to improve manufacturing quality and success.

The man was W. Edwards Deming. Between 1950 and 1960, Japan sky-rocketed to become the second most powerful economy in the world by applying Deming’s theories. It’s a great story. The continuous improvement was born.

Continuous Improvement and Recruiting

By 1980, the Japanese manufacturing methodologies were so dominant, the Untied States and other industrialized nations started to adopt them. Today, the competitive advantage Japan once enjoyed has diminished because most industrialized economies have also applied these principles.

Here’s the good news. While the use of continuous improvement principles is ubiquitous among manufacturing companies, their application among service businesses is more sporadic.

In the real estate industry, some business processes have been touched by these principles (i.e. transaction processing and escrow) while other processes have been ignored. The real estate recruiting process is one of those processes generally untouched by the continuous improvement principles.

Those who learn to apply these ideas could experience a significant competitive advantage over their competitors.

The General Framework of Continuous Improvement

The framework for continuous improvement is based on what Deming called a system of profound knowledge. This system has four components:

Appreciation of a System: An understanding that all businesses are made up of systems. You can’t improve a system (like recruiting) if you don’t realize it exists and treat it as something that can be improved.

Knowledge of Variation: An understanding that all systems have variation.  Variations have causes and those causes can often be controlled. As we discussed previously, systems with reliable outputs and low variation are the most valuable.

Theory of Knowledge: An understanding there are limits to what can be known.  Measurement activities must be focused on knowable things. There are some things that cannot be reliably known.

Knowledge of Psychology: An understanding that most systems involve people and you’ll never escape the human component and its influence. Understanding how people process information, make decisions, and interact with their environment is a critical component of success.

In our next blog post, we’ll discuss how to use this framework to create actionable business rules for the purpose of improving recruiting execution in your company.

Until then, do a quick self–inventory of the recruiting system in your office/company.

Do you treat recruiting as a business system?

Does your recruiting system produce variable results? What are the causes of the variations?

Do you know what can be reliably measured in this system? Are these measurements being conducted and documented?

Do you know what causes your candidates and others in your recruiting process to do the things they do?

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you should have a leg up on the last one! The others we’ll work on in our next post.

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