Blog: How Much Time Does Recruiting Really Take?

There are several things that you need to start with in order to make sure your recruiting schedule yields the results you desire.

Before we take a look at the three things that really make a difference, it’s important to say this: having an overall comprehensive plan to ensure that your schedule is as efficient as you need it to be is crucial to get the results you’re truly looking for in your recruiting plan.

Look historically at what you’ve done and what you are projecting to do via some type of overview. That overview should include a vast series of cause and effect factors that impact not only what you won with when it came to recruiting, but also where you think you fell short. If you only look at the wins you’re not looking at the possibility of what you learned from your losses.  In an industry like real estate it’s important that you learn from both. 

Here are three key factors that should be part of any overview or assessment that you use to determine your recruiting objectives in a plan format that leads to a worthwhile schedule. 

1. How many agents and what type of skill level are you looking to hire from an annualized basis? Things to       consider are items such as: 

• How many listings do they carry? 
• Is your company good at helping them attain more listings?  
• Are they buyer agents ?
• Are they growing or shrinking in their business? 
• Are they new agents?
• Do they have a sphere of influence that they consistently get business from?

All of these factors help you create an accurate agent avatar that you want, as well as how many of them you need in order to have a truly successful recruiting year. You have to roll up your sleeves and look into these numbers. The last thing you want is to hire 30 agents and they all leave in the first 12 months. That is a complete waste of time. 

2. Who is going to be spending time on the process?  Because growth should be an integral part of your company culture, the hiring process can’t simply be one person’s job to try to find, interview, hire and onboard agents in your brokerage.  Again talk about a huge waste of time.  Although it seems efficient let me explain why it’s an issue.  If one person is doing the bulk of the hiring in your office, you will end up having a recruiting system that walks out the door one day causing you to go into a recruiting scramble. As the broker/ owner of a company your recruiting system should be yours.  Other people in your office should help facilitate your recruiting process (it is critical that although they have input, the system itself should be one that is Uniquely Yours).  That way if they decide to leave you’re not starting over at Ground Zero weeks, months, or even years in your recruiting efforts.  Agents that are hired by a single person have a certain established relationship with that person instead of creating a relationship with the company as a whole from the beginning.  It is much more important from day one the agent has a very established relationship with the support structure of your office, versus having a relationship with the person that hired them. 

3. Know Thyself.  How much time do you have to spend focusing on recruiting?  Is it what you want to do?  Are you good at it?  Would your time be better spent doing something else?  Is there someone else in your office that could do one part of the recruiting process exponentially better than you? Do you have a team in your office that has an administrative assistant that could help you make calls to new licensees and set appointments? This would allow you to spend time on experienced agent opportunities.  You have to truly take a look at your strengths and weaknesses. Then you will know how to leverage the resources around you to optimize your recruiting.