Real Estate Recruiter Tips: 7 Ways to Improve Quality of Hire

Real Estate Recruiter Tips

To achieve growth and success, a business needs good employees. This is particularly true for real estate brokerages, considering that most of their profits depend on the performance of their agents. For HR departments and recruiters, this means continuously looking for ways to improve the quality of hire.

In essence, quality of hire measures how much value an employee contributes to the achievement of the company’s goals. It also delivers benefits like improved retention, increased productivity, more cost savings, and higher job satisfaction. All of these combined can help take your brokerage to the proverbial next level.

To improve the quality of hire in your brokerage, here are some simple tips that you can implement right away:

Use a Recruiting Software

Recruitment, in general, involves a lot of routine tasks. Many of them are easy enough to learn, but they do tend to take a lot of time. These include things like sending drip email campaigns, scheduling appointments, and updating individual candidates about the status of their application. Recruiters also regularly need to capture, import, and segment leads, as well as source candidates from various platforms. 

Good thing that HR professionals and recruiters now have access to CRM recruiting software to make all of these tasks so much easier to handle. For real estate recruiters, this website is an excellent place to know more. With the help of such technological tools, candidate communication and selection can be made more efficient.

Provide Clear Job Descriptions

One of the simplest ways to improve the quality of hire is to provide clear descriptions of your job listings. What is the job about and what is the brokerage expecting from new hires? Creating an accurate picture of the ideal candidate through detailed job descriptions and specific qualifications can already act as your pre-screening stage.

Admittedly, this can result in a much smaller pool of candidates. Depending on your hiring situation, this might not be ideal. Nevertheless, working with fewer candidates can also be more efficient especially when you’re sure that they meet the initial criteria you’ve set.

Collect Pre-Hire and Post Hire Data

To measure the quality of hire, it’s a good idea to look at both pre- and post-hire data so that you can gain a complete picture of the real estate agent’s value-add to the brokerage. When the relationship between the two sets of data shows positive results, then you’ve made a good hire.

Pre-hire data can include scores on pre-employment tests, character assessment, and interview results. The information gathered from the candidate’s resume also qualifies as pre-hire data. Post-hire data, meanwhile, can include performance evaluation ratings, hiring satisfaction, tenure or retention, and ramp-up time (the time it took for the employee to achieve full productivity). Employee input is also valuable, particularly when you want to measure culture fit.

Identify Quality Markers With Your Best Employees

The definition of a high-quality hire changes from brokerage to brokerage. To arrive at a conclusive answer, you can take a look at your best employees. What are their qualities? How well do they fit with the company culture? Who are the most satisfied at their jobs? Do note that many of these are qualitative, so you’re going to have to involve a number of your employees to be objective.

Build a Talent Pool

Your brokerage’s quality of hire suffers when you’re reactive rather than proactive. Don’t wait until you need to fill a job before looking for candidates. Instead, start reaching out to potential hires and passive candidates and build relationships with them. Treat this as a regular part of your networking and recruiting process.

Building a sizable talent pool like this will create a smoother hiring process because you don’t have to start from scratch when there’s a vacancy. Rather, you can simply get in touch with those in your network whom you know would be a great fit. You can fill the post much quicker, with a person who has a high likelihood of being a good employee.

Anonymize the Application

According to research, there are more women real estate agents than men (about a 54%-42% split). There are also some studies that show that many job ads tend to have gender-coded words. Both of these factors can skew the number of applicants and you might end up missing out on really great candidates.

To avoid this problem, it’s a good idea to anonymize your application. Review your ads and job descriptions so that they sound more neutral (e.g., use “they” instead of “he” or “she”). Anonymizing applications can also help you get rid of any unconscious biases that can get in the way of hiring potentially great people.

Don’t Rush the Process

There are times when you really have to hire quickly. This shouldn’t always be the case, however. In most cases, a little over 30 days is the average time to hire. Take this time to carefully evaluate your candidates. Don’t feel the pressure to fill an open role as fast as possible, or you might end up with a bad hire.

Of course, you won’t immediately see the results overnight. You might even need to hire a couple of new employees to really appreciate the effects of these changes. Still, it’s best to implement them now so that you can reap their benefits in the future.

About Carson Derrow

My name is Carson Derrow I'm an entrepreneur, professional blogger, and marketer from Arkansas. I've been writing for startups and small businesses since 2012. I share the latest business news, tools, resources, and marketing tips to help startups and small businesses to grow their business.