For your real estate brokerage to grow, you need to find the best people to work with you. Thus, you need to develop a robust real estate recruitment program. Indeed, even if you’re working with a third-party recruiter, you should still develop your own strategies. This way, you’ll be able to ensure that you’re able to hire from a pool of talented candidates.
That said, if you’re still in the process of developing or refining your strategies, this may be the real estate recruiter guide you’re looking for. Check out the most important things you need to do below:
6 Things You Need to Do to Craft a Successful Real Estate Recruitment Program
Identify Gaps in the Workforce
Before you even start looking for candidates in your real estate recruitment, you need to figure out what kind of employee you’re looking for. Identify not just skill gaps but also tenure or experience gaps. Do you need fresh talent? Long-time agents? Both?
You also need to factor in the growth of your brokerage, as well as other factors such as turnover rate and upcoming projects. What kinds of gaps will the leaving employees leave behind? What kinds of gaps will these upcoming projects create? You need to identify these so you can learn exactly what kinds of employees you need to look for.
Stratify Your Team
For brokerages with in-house real estate recruitment teams, it’s best to stratify them based on their skill and knowledge level. Then, assign each stratum to a role or two. In short, you need the right recruiter to recruit the right people. If you’re looking for senior real estate agents, then you’re going to need someone who has an established track record of finding the best applicants out of the bunch.
(Most third-party recruitment companies are likely already doing this with their own teams. However, it still pays to make such a request. Good recruiters will see the wisdom of stratifying their talent to find good candidates more efficiently.)
Create a Recruitment Calendar
Recruitment is an inescapable fact for real estate brokerages and indeed, all kinds of companies. Thus, you need to be more proactive about your approach. You don’t spring to action only when there’s a job opening. Rather, you stay prepared so that you’re ready to fill the position as quickly as you can.
Creating a recruitment calendar can help you enter that “always recruiting” mindset. Again, you can make reasonable assumptions by taking into account your brokerage’s growth and other activities or developments related to it. From there, you can work on your hiring timeline and plot it on your recruitment calendar.
Find the Tools You Need
To make things more efficient, your brokerage should invest in various real estate recruitment solutions. These include software like CRM software, applicant tracking systems (ATS), various screening tools, and data analytics. All of these can help you organize and improve your hiring efforts.
Do note that there are some tools that combine two solutions in one. For example, a CRM can have a built-in ATS and data analytics. The key is to pinpoint what you need in a recruitment tool and then look for the one that matches all your requirements.
Source Smart
Before you’re able to hire the best real estate professionals, you first need to know where to look for them. The most traditional methods of sourcing include employee referrals as well as job boards. However, you can also find promising talent in industry events. There’s also a lot of both job seekers and passive candidates on social media.
To make things easier in the future, once you’ve discovered where and how to source, start building a talent pool. This way, you don’t have to scramble if there’s ever an urgent position that needs to be filled. Make sure to continuously add to this talent pool, even if and most especially when you’re not actively looking for new employees.
Of course, you can also take a look at your own ranks. Maybe the best candidate is someone you’ve already hired and are simply awaiting that well-deserved promotion!
Boost Your Brokerage Online
Last but certainly not least, for your recruitment programs to succeed, you need to build a positive image of your brokerage online. Remember: one of the first things that candidates do when they’re interested in applying is to look up your company on the internet. Without a carefully crafted and well-updated website and overall digital presence, you won’t be able to make a good first impression.
Prioritize your website, among all your other digital assets. Keep your careers page updated and feature some testimonials from your employees. For your social media pages, curate your content. It may be a good idea to create a separate page or account dedicated to the recruitment, so your posts don’t get buried under other updates. Having a robust social media presence can also make sourcing a lot easier on these platforms.
Over the years, the real estate industry has become more and more competitive. Thus, brokerages need to step up their recruitment game in order to stand out from the competition. Hopefully, this guide can help you figure out a good strategy and build a recruitment program that can fulfil all your hiring requirements.
