Earlier
this year, our company had the privilege of hiring Helen Jackson.  Helen is a very talented individual who I’ve
known for many years.  She has served our
community (a mid-sized suburb of Seattle) in many non-profit, education and
athletic advisory roles.  She is known
and admired by more people in our community than I could begin to count.

Her
daughter Emily grew up playing baseball
(not softball) with a couple of my sons. 
I remember frequently asking my boys…"Did Emily strike you out today?" The answer was often…"Yes, she did!"  That’s a tough thing for a teenage boy to admit. Emily is now playing softball
at a Division-I college in Illinois.

When
Helen agreed to work with our company, I was eager to hear her perspective on
our business and the role we play in the real estate industry.  Being competitive herself and working with so
many high performers over the years, I suspected her insight would be helpful.

I’ve
not been disappointed.  She has worked in
a consulting role with one of our clients in the Midwest over the last couple
of months.  As a recruiting coordinator,
she works closely with both hiring managers and candidates.

Last
week, she offered to record some of her thoughts on working in this new
role.  Her thoughts (in this dialog) are
from the candidate’s perspective, and I thought they were worth sharing.

"I've
been working with Tidemark for several months as a recruiter and I am
continuously surprised at how very few individuals truly understand the
challenges and opportunities of becoming a real estate agent; particularly in
choosing the right broker.

My
mother was an agent and a broker well into her sixties and mentioned many times
that it allowed her to survive as a middle-aged widow with no other form of
income. As a broker, she had several agents working in her firm and she always
said that making sure your agents were successful was the same as having a
successful business.

But
that was in the time of the real estate boom, in a small New England town where
she knew most of the residents. What about today, I wondered?

Today,
the real estate market seems to work like the stock market, albeit a little
slower, but still driven by the economy and the whims of buyers and sellers. So,
the broker an agent chooses is extremely important.

In
researching what makes a great broker, I realized that the characteristics of a
good broker are exactly what I would want in an agent if I were buying or
selling a home.

I
developed the following acronym to express those defining features:

Honesty. Tell me what I can expect
financially and explain the relationship of the
broker and agent in clear and concise terms.

Opportunity. What are the opportunities;
how long will it take for me to realize the
opportunity and where are the pitfalls?

Mentoring. What classes and training are
offered. Who teaches the classes? Is there
a fee?

Expenses. What are they? Do you assist
in developing an expenses spreadsheet?
What are the splits? Can I really make a profit? How?

Support. Are you there for me? Can I
come to you for advice; encouragement? Do
you reach out to me to see how I am doing?"

 

Do
a quick inventory:  Do you find yourself
positively addressing these issues during your interactions with
candidates?  It’s important to remember
that new agents are “buying” a business relationship with their broker. Helen
has done a great job of identifying what many of the best buyers are seeking.

Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Hopefully, you had the opportunity
to read Part 1 of this discussion.  I
thought Dave did a great job of explaining how gaining momentum in the
recruiting process requires a focus on completing small tasks over time.  If you’re not a football fan—hang in there:
We’re almost done with the football analogies.

For the Seahawks, the “small
task” that kept them out of the end zone (a week ago Monday) was a failure to
convert on 3^rd down. 

Likewise, if you’re experiencing
a lack of hires, the source of the
problem is always earlier in the
hiring process.  If you identify and fix
the upstream problems, the hires will come.

After reading Dave’s post, I spent
some time studying the source article in the Seattle Times, and I was surprised
what I discovered.   There was a short quote by one of Seattle’s
receivers that caught my attention:

"Every week Pete Carroll (the
Seahawk’s Head Coach) asks his team a rhetorical question, in which the answer
never changes.

Said receiver Sidney Rice, ‘He
always asks us…what do we have to do to win in third and 10-plus? And the answer
is always: Stay out of that situation.'

The Seahawks have not done a good job avoiding
third-and-long situations. The Seahawks have had 29 third downs this season and
21 of them have been 3rd-and-6 or longer. Of those 21, 14 have been 3rd-and-10
or longer.

Seattle has converted on 38
percent of those third downs, which ranks 18th in the league, but it’s not a
sustainable way to operate. Rice said facing 3rd-and-long allows defenses to
play Seattle differently than they normally have to because the threat to run
the ball is gone. "

I think there are two
applications from this part of the article:

1.  Professionals
use metrics.  Considering these guys
are a bunch of dumb football jocks, they sure do use math a lot!  Why? 
Because they’re professionals, and professionals use metrics.  You should know and track the recruiting
metrics that lead to your hiring success—that’s what professionals do.

2.  Don’t
do all of your recruiting on 3^rd down.   Our staff works with hundreds of real estate
hiring managers in different parts of the country.  At least once a week, we hear one or more of
these hiring managers try to convince themselves they don’t want to meet with
“new to real estate” candidates until they are already licensed or actively
enrolled in real estate school. 

In
recruiting, this is equivalent to gaining no yardage on 1^st and 2^nd
down and facing 3^rd down and long yardage on every interview.  At this point in the recruiting game, your
competitors know exactly what you’re going to do and will easily key upon your
weaknesses. 

We
have one client who insists on conducting only late stage interviews.  They regularly lose 50% of their recruiting
opportunities to competitors—even though they are the best company in their
market.   

This
happens because they wait too long to engage the candidates.  At this point in the hiring process, the
candidates have no relationship with the hiring manager.  They are very susceptible to being fooled by lower splits, accepting gimmicky promotions, and believing promises that will
never be kept.

In
contrast, we regularly see clients who engage candidates early in the process that have “lost to competitor” rates of 10% or
less.  Why?  The candidates tend to sign with the person
they trust.   When objections are raised
late in the hiring process, they can be thoughtfully discussed and handled with
the candidate’s best interest in mind. 

Getting
the hire under these conditions is often a small nudge at the end of the
process instead of lobbing a pass into a crowded group of competitors and
hoping for the best.

How
did the Seahawks do last Sunday?  They
had a huge come-from-behind win in overtime against the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers.  While there were definitely
some miraculous plays that helped them win, there was a small stat buried in
the box score that many people will overlook:

"The Seahawks converted eight of 12 third-down situations,
for a season-high percentage (.667), including their final six. The Seahawks
finished with 415 yards, their third-highest total of the season. Their 26
first downs were the second-highest total."

The Seahawks learned their lesson and put themselves in a
position to win.  Hopefully, you will do
the same.

Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.