As a real estate recruiter or HR professional, one of your ultimate goals is to find the most talented real estate agents. With the best of the best working with you, it’s easier to meet your targets and grow your brokerage. However, while the goal is straightforward enough on paper, it’s not as simple in practice. With fierce competition in the industry, you may find yourself having a difficult time finding the right candidates—let alone qualified ones.
To overcome this common hurdle, you need to develop creative recruiting real estate agent strategies. Here are some ideas you might want to consider:
Consider the Use of VR
There are a variety of technological tools that can make real estate recruitment much easier and more seamless. For example, you can make use of a piece of CRM software with features that streamline tasks like sending email drip campaigns, scheduling interviews, and capturing leads from industry data sources. Another valuable technology you can use in your recruitment efforts is VR or virtual reality. Through the help of VR headsets, you can give candidates an immersive tour of your office even when you aren’t able to be there physically. This is especially useful when you’re at a job fair in a different location, so that potential hires are more easily able to envision themselves working in your brokerage.
Do note that VR can be a bit of an investment. That said, it also has more uses outside of recruitment. For example, you can develop 360° videos of properties for sale. This will make it easier for real estate agents to show multiple homes or offices to clients, resulting in higher efficiency and more time savings. Having such technology at your disposal is also a powerful convincing tool for talented real estate agents looking for a brokerage that can empower them to do their jobs well.
Gamify Your Assessment
Aside from the interview, one of the most crucial parts of the application process is the skills assessment. This stage lets you better determine which candidates are truly the most suited for the job. The problem is that skills assessment is an inherently austere procedure. It can also take a long time, especially since you need to be more thorough. This can make candidates feel anxious and make the application process seem unappealing. To make skills assessment more engaging for candidates and at the same time more efficient for hiring managers, consider gamifying it. Incorporate elements such as getting past challenges and earning badges in order to advance to the next level. This ensures that your assessment is truly skills-focused and free from any biases.
Let Peers Interview the Candidate
When it comes to interviewing candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, and HR professionals are more than qualified to do the job right. However, there’s also merit in involving a candidate’s peers in this stage of recruitment. Specifically, consider having a couple of people that the candidate will likely work with if or when they get hired. This allows you to gauge how effectively these would-be colleagues accomplish their tasks and if they’ll get along swimmingly personality-wise. Your employees can also more accurately describe what it is to work in the brokerage. This can help the candidate manage their expectations when it comes to their day-to-day activities if they end up working with you. Finally, involving a candidate’s peers in the interview process can give a good glimpse of the company culture. This is a huge factor in a real estate agent’s decision to join a brokerage, so this is definitely worth a try if you aren’t doing it yet. Best of all, this form of recruitment literally costs you nothing. Check more: executive search firm in California.
Use Shortform Video
Nowadays, shortform videos are among the most preferred digital content formats by consumers. This is why platforms like TikTok are enjoying literally millions of active users daily. If you haven’t considered this medium yet for your job ads and recruitment campaigns, you may want to give it a try. What’s great about this type of content is that you can be as creative as you want with it. It’s also highly interactive, allowing you to establish rapport with candidates before they even submit an application with your brokerage.
Text, Don’t Email
Email is an incredibly effective medium for recruitment. However, it’s not everyone’s preferred form of communication. In particular, if you’re targeting to hire younger real estate agents, you might achieve a better response rate if you get in touch via text message. Remember: this generation is composed of digital natives. They grew up with a multitude of digital platforms already available to them, and email is definitely not on top of that list.
Don’t Look for Applications Only
Last but certainly not least, sometimes, the best way to recruit real estate agents is to not actively recruit them. Granted, this isn’t really “creative” in the strictest sense, but it’s definitely one of the frequently overlooked recruitment practices. When you announce a job opening, don’t look exclusively for applications; instead, expand your target to cover lead generation as well. When a potential candidate expresses interest, start by collecting the most basic information from them (i.e, name, email, phone number, and whether or not the person has a real estate license). Some of them may submit an application later on, while some may not. The latter group, with their consent, can be added to your potential candidate pool for future job openings. It’s normal to experience difficulties in recruiting real estate agents. If you’re experiencing it a little too frequently, however, you may consider the above ideas to improve your results. Good luck!
