Tip #1? Hire a recruiter…
All joking aside, there’s nothing new in our saying that you need to focus on what you do to make money and grow your real estate business by outsourcing other tasks to people who are qualified to handle them for you, like recruiting.
Part of what we talked about previously—hire slow and fire fast—is directly related. Hiring slow means having an effective, consistent and documented process to ensure that you are getting the candidates you want, and not hiring just any warm body because they showed up for the interview. The single biggest way you can improve the quality of your hires is to improve your hiring process. But how?
Know your business goals
If you don’t have a grip on your long and short term goals, it’s really difficult to hire the right people to achieve them. Your job descriptions, job opening ad wording, interview questions and so on, all need to be geared to your business goals. If you’re hiring a real estate assistant and your business goal is to free up 20% of your time from doing administrative tasks so that you can improve sales by the same amount, you need to look at what tasks are taking up all of your time, what you can offload from your desk and what skills a person would need to be able to take those tasks on. Within that list is your ideal job description.
Know your ideal candidate
Look at your past hires and make a comprehensive list of the qualities that made them good (or bad). Be as detailed as you can as to the attributes that you found to be most useful and effective so that you know what you are looking for with your latest hire. If you’ve never hired in that specific role before, figure out more general attributes that you consider to be vital to the role. Talk to other realtors and ask them what qualities they found most important for the role you are hiring for. Doing this will help you clarify your needs and to see the right candidates, hidden in among the less right ones, more clearly.
Remind yourself that a candidate is like a customer
Don’t be the employer who thinks that just because they’re doing the hiring, and the candidates want the job, that they can treat people poorly: no communication, no getting back to someone post-interview, no feedback. If you treated customers this way, they wouldn’t be customers for long, so take the same approach with candidates. An applicant who feels valued throughout the process will give back tenfold. There’s no upside to damaging your reputation or that of your real estate office by being ‘that employer’. If you feel you don’t have time to be communicative, outsource your hiring process to recruiters. We have the processes you need in place and are focused on ensuring that every placement is the best possible one, for both the client and the candidate.
Hire in a timely fashion
It’s important not to wait until the rest of your back office staff is stretched to the limits of their capacities before starting the hiring process. It’s also important not to over-hire and have too many bodies and not enough work. It’s not always an easy balance to maintain, particularly if you suddenly lose an employee and find yourself scrambling. If the rest of your team knows that they have to pull up the shortfall for a little while, and not permanently, they’ll be happier to take up the slack. Communication on hiring, even with existing employees, is key.
Bottom line? You can’t grow your real estate business if you don’t have the support in place to ensure that you’re doing what you do best. Finding those candidates who best fit your organization and style can be time consuming. Best leave that to the experts at AGENTC!
