On the topic of employee retention, HBR reported:
 
Lifelong employment and loyalty are simply not part of today’s world; pretending that they are decreases trust by forcing both sides to lie.
 
As an alternative, some companies are starting to use a “tour of duty” concept to have productive discussions about retention.
 
A tour of duty covers a shorter timeframe but infers more commitment.
 
Broker Commitment:
 
I’ll pour support and resources into you for the purpose of making you a better entrepreneur, business owner, and agent.
 
Agent Commitment:
 
I’ll pour my talent and life energy into this opportunity for the purpose of growing your company and helping you accomplish your business objectives.
 
How long should a tour of duty last?
 
Most companies are asking for two to four-year commitments.
 
For real estate, the two-year end of that spectrum is probably more reasonable.
 
The tour of duty should also include an in-depth discussion at the halfway point to evaluate progress towards the objectives.
 
HBR concludes that business owners can’t build successful companies by expecting agents to make lifetime employment commitments.
 
But you can create a better working agreement than “every person for themselves.”

In the next few Insights, we’ll be covering how to have retention discussions with your agents.
 
It’s important to be proactive on this topic—especially this time of year.
 
During one of your upcoming coaching sessions, you might want to just ask:
 
Have you ever thought about leaving our company?
 
The consensus among HR studies over the last decade confirms that 25% of high-potential employees plan on leaving their current employer within a year.
 
Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, once wrote,
 
Once you get past this scary truth, you’ll find it easier to achieve honest, productive relationships that support your [agents’] ambitions.
 
This will make your [agents] more effective on the job and may actually keep them around longer.
 
This kind of honesty equips healthy organizations to forge a new paradigm for the broker-agent relationship.
 
[A healthy broker-agent relationship] is not based on loyalty, but it’s not purely transactional, either. It’s an alliance between an organization and an individual that’s aimed at helping both succeed.
 
Discovering and committing to win-win agreements always works—especially when engaging your best and brightest agents.

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.  Word-of-Mouth Referrals
3. Search Engine Optimization Strategies
 
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.

There are many hiring managers in the real estate industry who started out as great real estate agents.
 
A few years back, I read a consumer’s account of working with two different types of real estate agents:
 
My wife and I have been looking at apartments in London.
 
We’ve noticed there are two types of estate agents.
 
The first type will explain the size of the rooms, the facilities in the building, the distance to the nearest metro station, council tax bands, appliances, and highlight the key features of the property.
 
They stress how the features of this property are better than others.
 
The second type will wait and see what catches our eye. Then they tell stories based upon our passion. If we express interest in the modern kitchen, they will explain the quality of the furnishings, the rare design used, and how it will be different to other kitchens.
 
If we’re passionate about the view, they will talk about how far you can see on a (rare) sunny day, how it feels to have a coffee in the morning, and they explain the history of the area below–pointing out where landmarks used to be.
 
As a real estate professional, it’s obvious the second approach will be more effective.
 
But it’s remarkable how many hiring managers forget what they learned as agents when they start doing interviews and interacting with prospects.
 
What persuades buyers and sellers persuades recruiting prospects too.
 
In both arenas, they’re just normal people who are trying to make a big decision in their lives.

Earlier this week, we learned deliberate practice is what turns average performers into experts.
 
The deliberate practice framework can be easily applied to a simple process such as physical skill improvement (ex. improving your golf swing), but is it useful in an area as complex and fluid as recruiting?
 
According to author Morten Hansen, it can be helpful in improving soft skills by using something researchers call “The Learning Loop.”
 
The Learning Loop has four sequential components:
 
1. Do: Select a task to perform (ex. conducting an interview).
 
2. Measure: Pick several things about the task to measure (ex. time of interview, engagement level of the candidate, likelihood of candidate moving to next step in the hiring process).
 
3. Feedback: If a metric is less than ideal, what can be done to improve (ex. candidate engagement was low, you talked too much early in the interview)?
 
4. Modify: Make a plan to modify your behavior based on the feedback (ex. I will only ask open-ended questions for the first 20 minutes of the interview).
 
The Learning Loop then restarts the next time you perform the task and loop through the same learning steps.
 
Over time, this process has been shown to produce remarkable improvements.
 
Hansen reports that individuals who implement and use The Learning Loop process typically end up in the top 10% of organizations.
 
With this type of upside, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

For many years, social scientists have tried to quantify the underlying causes of happiness.
 
In the workplace, the topic is relevant because there is a lot of research linking employee happiness to positive business outcomes and retention.
 
So, what causes employees to experience happiness in the workplace?  
 
From the agent/employee perspective, here are four of the drivers researchers have identified that lead to happiness in the workplace:
 
1.  An agent’s trust in their company’s leadership: Is my manager really looking out for my success?
 
2. A culture where agents are encouraged to share ideas and individual opinions:  Are my ideas valued by those around me?
 
3. A workplace where co-workers feel like family or friends:  Do I have friends at work I can trust and reach out to for support?
 
4. Benefits customized to meet an agent’s needs:  Does my manager understand and flex to meet my needs?
 
Take a quick inventory.
 
Would your agents say these characteristics are well-represented in your company or team?
 
If not, start thinking through some changes necessary to make these traits part of your identity.
 
Retention starts with creating a place where agents experience happiness in their day-to-day work.
 
These are the places where high performing agents want to land and stay.

Only deliberate practice does.
 
According to researchers, gaining experience through repetition alone will not make you an expert—it just makes you good at the mistakes contributing to mediocrity.
 
Peak performers know repetition is important, but it must be combined with something more to turn someone into an expert.
 
Here’s what else is needed:
 
Individuals who progress the most meticulously assess outcomes, solicit feedback based on known standards of excellence, and strive to correct tiny flaws once the feedback has been uncovered.
 
Yesterday, we talked about breaking the recruiting process into small measurable steps and creating task level goals.
 
If one of your task level goals is lagging, it’s time to start deliberately practicing.
 
There is a difference between amateur and expert recruiters, and it usually results in dozens of hires.

Every recruiting organization should set recruiting goals, and most do.
 
While goals articulate the desired outcomes, they often don’t address the tasks that lead to the anticipated results.
 
For example: If you want to hire 10 new agents for your office this year, what tasks are necessary to make that happen?
 
Here are three tasks that could be tracked (there could be many more): Sourcing recruiting prospects, conducting interviews, and post-interview follow-up touches.
 
How many recruiting prospects are needed to get one high-quality interview? Set a goal to acquire that number of prospects.
 
How many interviews are needed to get one high-quality pipeline addition? Set a goal to conduct that number of interviews.
 
What frequency of follow-up touches are necessary to keep candidates moving forward in your pipeline? Set a goal to conduct that many touches.
 
Setting goals at the task level allows you to measure your progress more effectively on a day-to-day basis.
 
Your initial assumptions on how certain tasks contribute to the end goal may not be correct, but over time true metrics will emerge.
 
This methodology sets you free to focus on the things you can control rather than beating yourself up for not reaching the end goal.

Last week, we discussed how recruiting new agents is like selling something to an inexperienced amateur.
 
Since they don’t have a framework to understand your features and benefits, they’ll usually seek out advice from friends or advisors to make a decision.
 
But what about recruiting experienced agents? 
 
Recruiting them is like selling to professionals.
 
When professionals make purchase decisions, they tend to buy from people like themselves.
 
First, they want to know if they can trust and respect you.
 
Researchers refer to this as the warmth and confidence dimensions for a professional conversation.
 
Next, they want to know if you understand the uniqueness of their situation and needs.
 
This takes active listening, attention to detail, and a willingness to temporarily defer your agenda.
 
With this foundation in place, they may be willing to consider how you can help them solve their problems.
 
There’s always a temptation to short-cut this process and pretend you’re recruiting an amateur.
 
But true professionals insist on being treated as such.
 
When treated inappropriately, they conclude you’re the amateur. And they’d be right.

Several years ago, Seth Godin published an article on the difference between selling to a professional and selling to an amateur.
 
A professional is going to buy from someone like you.
 
They’re going to have a process to review the opportunity, a method, an experienced approach to obtaining what they need.
 
An amateur, on the other hand, may or may not follow any of those principles. An amateur is comparing you to what? A miracle? To free? To something in between?
 
Professionals run the procurement process at Pottery Barn. Amateurs buy a new house every fifteen years.
 
Professionals buy from other professionals.  Amateurs ask friends for advice.
 
In this regard, selling and recruiting are similar.
 
Deluging a recruiting prospect who is new to real estate with an exhaustive list of features/benefits is a waste of time and effort.
 
In the end, they’re going to ask their friends for advice.
 
It is better to spend the time you have together building trust and becoming their friend.

For most real estate leaders and managers, maintaining the status quo is a prescription for failure.
 
High performers know there’s a constant need to redesign and improve their workflows.
 
Research supports this notion. In one study of more than 5000 managers, those who periodically redesigned their work performed significantly better than those who didn’t.
 
How do you redesign your work?
 
Start with assessing the value of your tasks and work outputs (refer to yesterday’s Insight).
 
Then follow this simple formula for redesign:
 
Do less of the “low-value” stuff. You can’t start to redesign until you stop doing certain tasks. I recently told one manager to remove 40% of the tasks from their schedule.
 
Do more of the “high-value” stuff. Once you identify a high-value task, schedule more of these activities for yourself in the holes you’ve created in your schedule.
 
Improve quality and efficiency. Doing the right things better and faster have a multiplying effect on your performance. It’s easier to do this when the diversity in your tasks has decreased.
 
This looks simple, but it’s not easy.
 
It requires a ruthless focus on performance and a strong desire to control your work–no matter how much your work wants to control you.

Here’s a comment I’ve heard real estate owners/executives say dozens of times:
 
I want our managers to focus on the tasks and activities that produce the highest value for the organization.
 
This seems kind of nebulous. What exactly does “highest value” mean?
 
According to author Morton Hansen, it’s not nebulous at all—there’s an equation for it that can be used in almost any organization:
 
The Value of a Person’s Work = (Benefits to Others) x (Quality) x (Efficiency)
 
Let’s compare two activities to demonstrate how this can be applied.
 
Task #1: Handling an administrative problem in your office.
 
Solving this problem typically benefits one person (the person who had the problem).
 
The quality of your solution would probably be good (you’re a smart person).
 
The efficiency of the solution would be poor because the company is paying a lot of money to get a problem solved that could have been handled by a lower-paid employee.
 
Overall, this activity has a low value.
 
Task #2: Setting recruiting appointments with experienced agents who work for competitors.
 
Getting appointments leads to hires. Hires benefit you (more income), your company (additional revenue), and the person being hired (higher production).
 
If you’re good at getting appointments, the value of this activity can quickly multiply.
 
The efficiency of this activity is remarkable when it converts to a hire. New hires not only add revenue, but also turn into annuities for your office and company for years to come.
 
Recruiting and retention activities are the highest value activities a manager can be doing.
 
The work value equation proves it.

One of the high performing hiring managers I coach recently described how she encouraged her executive team to jump into the recruiting game.
 
I just hired a $3M producer, and I asked my CEO to welcome her aboard.  The newly hired agent was elated to get a call from the CEO and said: 
 
“I never even talked to the executives from my previous brokerage, and on my first day here, I’m being welcomed aboard.”
 
Later that week, another call went out to an agent who transferred from out of state and recently joined this manager’s office.
 
The CEO called this agent and said:
 
“I know this isn’t your first transaction, but it’s your first transaction with us. I appreciate the contribution you’re making to our company.”
 
If you’re a hiring manager, invite your executive team to participate in these types of calls.
 
If you’re an executive, ask your managers to let you know about opportunities to interact with prospects, new hires, and experienced agents.
 
Being personally noticed and recognized by someone an agent perceives as important makes them feel important.
 
It’s a win-win, and something this easy to implement shouldn’t be ignored.

We all want quick results—especially those who are involved in the real estate recruiting process.

Our compensation, our bonuses, and our egos are all attached to bringing the newly hired agents across the finish line.

It’s no surprise that many high-performing recruiters and hiring managers are always looking for ways to reduce the time-to-hire.

One area you might not have considered is the age demographic of your recruiting prospects.

A recent recruiting study revealed that the age of your recruiting prospects may increase time-to-hire more than you imagined.

If your recruiting prospect is over 35 years old, they are 34% more likely to report they’ll be “staying in their current job indefinitely.”

This is not a license to age discriminate* in the hiring process, but it should cause you to reconsider how you approach each age group.

Younger prospects will be more responsive to short-term recruiting tactics.

Mature prospects will usually require a longer incubation period.

One-size-fits-all (in this case, one-age-fits-all) recruitment marketing content and recruiting methodologies will typically under-perform more customized approaches.

==========
*It is illegal to ask someone their age during the hiring process and/or use age-related information as a condition for hiring. Generalized demographic information may be used to help customize recruiting marketing content to engage more prospects of all ages.

In a post from the archive, 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.