Selling the Invisible For Recruiting

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

I’ve recently been listening to the audio book
edition of the classic Selling the Invisible by Harry
Beckwith.

You might think that I picked this title as a
means of improving our sales within Tidemark, but you’d be mistaken. I did read this book a few years ago for
that purpose, but this time I wanted to think through how proven marketing ideas could help you improve the recruiting process.

It’s been my observation that most well-run real
estate companies understand that they are not only in the real estate
transaction business, but also in the agent recruiting business. Gaining
market share means performing both functions well.

I’ve also noticed that top recruiting companies share
a common defining characteristic—their management teams tend to seek out any
and all information that might lead them to increased results. There is a solid
correlation between openness to assessment/feedback and steady improvement.

Those who are not willing to track, examine,
metric, compare, and seek improvement (including challenging long-held beliefs)
will invariably underperform their competitors and peers.

As I was listening to Selling the Invisible from
this perspective, I wrote down several principles that differentiate the best
recruiting companies behavior from those who struggle. Here are some of
the standout differentiators and my comments beside each one:

Assume your service is bad. It can't hurt, and it
will force you to improve. It is so uncanny how the best leaders I
have ever met in my entire life have always made this assumption. Conversely
the worst have an arrogant stance of "we've figured it out." I have
learned a great deal through the humility of these fine leaders.

Ignore your industry's benchmarks, and copy
Disney's. The point here is to surprise the candidate. Remember the
blog we did on the offices that display a welcome sign with each candidate’s
name before every interview?

Big mistakes are big opportunities. If
you aren't' performing well, see it as a time to examine, learn and improve. If you make a mistake with a candidate,
follow it with an apology, a gift card, and a promise to improve. This will typically work wonders to reversing
the course of the hiring process for most people.

Don't just think better. Think different. Be open to
out of the box ways of understanding a dilemma. Don't get so locked into old
belief systems that you aren't willing to entertain other ways of seeing
realty. You just might discover something revolutionary.

Don't just create what the
market needs or wants. Create what it would love. For recruiting, the market is the candidates you’re interviewing. The thing that all
candidates love is to be understood thoroughly before making any bold
statements about how you can solve their pain.

Every act is a marketing
act. Make every employee a marketing employee. From
the first contact with a candidate until he hands you his license, every touch
with him is a marketing message.

What does each step in
your recruiting process suggest to a candidate? The candidates who will turn into top
producing agents will be intuitively sensitive to how they are being treated
(this is part of what will make them great agents).

If anyone on your team is
not treating them with the upmost amount of respect, they WILL go elsewhere. If
you’re waiting for agents to prove themselves before treating them with this
respect, you ARE losing the best candidates.

In most professional
services, you are not really selling expertise – because your expertise is
assumed, and because your prospect cannot intelligently evaluate your expertise
anyway. Instead you are selling a relationship.
Hopefully this speaks for itself.

Which of the above
principles can you improve upon? Which are strengths? Which are
weaknesses? Know that it is easier to see
the weaknesses in others rather than yourself, so you might want to re-read the
list a couple of times and make it a point of discussion with some of your peers.

Make sure you don’t miss
the first point as you process this information– we all must entertain a
need for improvement if we want to grow.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.

Helping People Transition from a Traditional Part-Time Job to a Full-Time Real Estate Agent—Part 3

Monday, September 02, 2013

I want to wrap up the current series of
blogs we’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. The premise of the
discussion thus far is that many individuals in the workforce find themselves
in part-time jobs that are not fully utilizing their skills, abilities, and
talents.

Some of these people may also find the
possibility of transitioning into a full-time real estate agent position as an
attractive alternative to their current circumstances.

If you haven’t read the previous two blogs
in this series, it may be helpful to catch-up (Part 1, Part 2) before reading
today’s conclusion.

Assuming you’ve bought into the premise of our discussion, the next question you may be asking is:

If there are talented individuals languishing
in part-time jobs, how do I find them?

The quick answer is figure out where
they’re working now. This may not be as hard as it sounds—searching through
some of the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) data will help us uncover some
answers.

Here are two tables of data that I found
particularly helpful, and I’ve also provided some commentary on each data set.

1.
People working in jobs that require less than a high-school education,
who are college graduates.

If a person finds themselves in one of
these professions after going through the hard work and financial sacrifice of
getting a college degree, I would suspect that many of them are very
frustrated. They are even more
frustrated if they can only get part-time hours.

Not all of these job categories would be a
natural fit for the real estate industry, but the following professions contain
a higher percentage of those who could make the transition to real estate:

-Retail Sales Persons

-Waiters and Waitresses

-Bartenders

-Home Health Aides

-Telemarketers

Of the 2.9 million people represented in
this chart, 1.6 million are employed in these five professions.

2.
People working in jobs that require a high-school education who are college
graduates.

Moving up the employment food chain, the next table
documents those who are closer to what they would consider a desirable job, but
still not quite there.

Almost all of the categories in this group
could be viable candidate pools for real estate agents with perhaps the
exception of agriculture workers.

Between the two data sets, there are over
six million college educated individuals (of all ages) who are working in jobs
where they are overqualified. If you also consider that many of these
individuals are being forced to work part-time, it’s easy to see why many of
them are languishing.

How do these candidate numbers compare to
the number of existing real estate agents in the United States?

The most recent estimates I’ve found report
the total number of real estate agents and brokers to be about 2.5 million
(900,000 of these agents are Realtors).

If the real estate industry needs to
replace 250,000 agents each year (I believe this is a conservative estimate),
then a candidate pool of six million is enough to fill this need adequately.

It is not a stretch to believe that 4% of
the candidate pool is a potential fit for a real estate agent position.

Conclusion. There are many companies in the real
estate industry who focus on the conventional candidate pools of experienced
agents (agents working for competitors) and new agents who have independently
made the decision to pursue a real estate career (these candidates typically
show up on a real estate commission’s newly licensed list).

While these candidate pools are important
recruiting sources (and should continue to be pursued), many real estate
companies do not pursue the “third-pool” of candidates. The third pool of candidates are the six million
individuals identified above.

Those companies who learn to recruit successfully
from the third pool will face less competition in the recruiting process, will
bring innovation into their companies at a higher rate, and will continue to improve their workforces.

Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

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.

Helping People Transition from a Traditional Part-Time Job to a Full-Time Real Estate Agent—Part 2

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

I received some great feedback on the most
recent WorkPuzzle discussion. It seems this topic has struck a cord with several
of you.

First, I received confirmation the
“defacto brand” of real estate being a destination for people who want to work
part-time is far from dead. In fact, in
many markets across the country, this branding is alive, well, and being
promoted.

As the real estate industry has started
recovering, there are some companies are who are eager to get back to business
as usual. They feel comfortable and
excited about the prospects of inviting any and all individuals (part-time,
full-time, qualified, unqualified etc.) into their offices. It’s back to the "in one side, and out the
other” conveyor belt of agent hiring.

This reality is unfortunate for those
companies who are trying to build high-quality teams. It’s hard enough to overcome the history of
the real estate industry without having to continually compete with those
promoting the lowest common denominator in terms of talent, commitment, and
focus. Unfortunately, candidates will
continue to be confused and high-performing hiring managers will have to work
harder to get their message to the right people.

Secondly, I received some feedback that
some of you may not be convinced the part-time / underemployment nature of
corporate America is as dismal as I’ve described it. In turn, they don’t seem
to have the confidence to sell a real estate career as a compelling full-time
alternative to the languishing that underemployment produces in the traditional
job market.

I think some of the data I cited in
previous discussions would support this assertion, but perhaps a real-life example
would help convince the remaining skeptics.

I was discussing this issue with one of
our company’s partners who also owns a large retail establishment in the
Seattle area. As an owner in that
business, he makes frequent deposits to the local branch office of a large, publically
traded bank.

This activity has allowed him to strike up
several conversations with the tellers and other employees in the bank. Recently, he made a deposit a couple hours
later than his normal time and noticed the bank was nearly empty of
employees. He asked the teller,

“Where is everyone? It doesn’t seem you have many tellers working
today.”

She replied.

“They’re off work right now, but they’ll
be back right before lunch to start the next portion of their shifts.”

More discussion ensued, and it became
evident the bank had learned to track the frequency and time of day of
transactions to the point where they could predict the workload of each teller
at any point in the day.

Naturally, it only made sense to have
their part-time employees work during times when those transactions were taking
place. A common employee schedule was
working an hour, taking two hours off, working two more hours, taking two hours
off, and then working two hours to finish up the day. By the end of the week, each employee has
worked 25 hours. They are comfortably in
the range where the employer can avoid paying benefits.

This may seem brilliant from the
employer’s perspective, but it is abusive from the employee’s perspective. What
kind of employees would accept this kind of work schedule? It is only those who do not see themselves as
having other employment options. There must be a lot of those individuals
available because they have no problem keeping positions filled.

As a real estate hiring manager, you have
a compelling alternative for some of these individuals. We all know that becoming a real estate
agent is not for everyone, but for some people it could be a wonderful escape
from employment situations where they are languishing.

To connect with these individuals, sell the
agent employment opportunity as the full-time alternative to what they have
been experiencing or will be experiencing in the corporate job world.

Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

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.

Helping People Transition from a Traditional Part-Time Job to a Full-Time Real Estate Agent

Thursday, August 15, 2013

In years past, the real estate industry developed a reputation
of accommodating those individuals who wanted
to work part-time. By contrast, it was
common for traditional businesses to require
employees to make a full-time commitment to the company.

The real estate industry also attracted many part-time
agents because some individuals wanted/needed to keep their “day jobs” that
provided medical benefits while working part-time as real estate agents on
nights and weekends.

Enough real estate companies allowed this behavior that the
perception stuck and a defacto brand was established from the candidate
perspective: The real estate industry is a viable place to work part-time.

This part-time/ full-time dynamic has long been a source of
frustration for many high-performing real estate companies, because part-time agents are rarely
successful. While the part-time status is now discouraged
(and sometimes even forbidden) by many real estate hiring managers, the
candidates often don’t know this until they get to the interview. Their perception is based on the defacto brand.

Wouldn’t it be great if the real estate industry employment
brand could be changed so that serious, professional, and full-time candidates were
the norm and those wanting part-time work focused on other industries?

That’s exactly what may start happening in the next few
years.

How? This radical
change in perception is being driven by some very powerful organic forces in
the job market at-large, and real estate companies will have the opportunity to
benefit from these changes.

The powerful change I’m referring to is the propensity that
traditional companies have towards cutting employee hours and benefits to avoid
upcoming healthcare reform requirements.
A recent article in the Washington Times highlights the impact of these
changes:

“Since January 2009 the country has added a net total of 270,000
full-time jobs, but it has added 1.9 million part-time jobs, according to the
House Ways and Means Committee.

The numbers come as…businesses [are trying] to save money and push
workers into shorter schedules to avoid the penalties that come from hiring
more full-time workers, who under the law will be required to be covered with
health care insurance.”

Think about what’s happening.
Our economy now has millions of people who are working part-time with no
medical or other traditional employee benefits.
Most of these people would rather be working full-time, but their
employers don’t offer this option.

To become more gainfully employed, some people are choosing to work two or more
part-time jobs. While this may work for some individuals, it’s often difficult to coordinate work schedules and make this option a viable long-term solution. So, many individuals hang-on to the best part-time job they can find,
lower their personal expenses, and wish they had a full-time job.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, many of these workers are
languishing and would be open considering options outside the traditional job
market. To a person in this situation, a real estate
agent position may look surprisingly attractive—it’s full-time and has an
opportunity for growth that corporate America cannot match.

As you shape your employment brand in the future, I recommend the
following:

1. Don’t hire part-time agents.
Offering full-time work is now your competitive advantage.

2. Learn to compete against those offering part-time jobs. Craft your recruiting messaging and your interview
tactics around the concept that your main competitors are non-real estate
companies offering part-time jobs. Find
out these competitors’ weaknesses and exploit them during the recruiting
process.

There are lots of talented people in the workforce who are not fully utilizing their talents. For the first time ever, the real estate industry may be in the best position engage these talents and put them to work in full-time positions.

Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

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.

Use It or Lose It: Important Research for Older Agents to Consider

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

We all witnessed, helplessly, as my
father-in-law rapidly declined in his cognitive abilities over the last eight
years of his life. Coincidentally, this
process seemed to start just a few years after he had decided to retire.

His decision to retire was partly based
on his desirable financial situation. After many years in law enforcement, his
pension benefits allowed him to bring home almost as much income as he would
have if he had continued working. So, he
decided to retire.

Many of us would probably have made the
same decision. However, recent brain
research suggests there is much more than finances to consider when making decisions
about retirement.

By far, the largest study (nearly a
half-million people) to look at the relationship
between the timing of retirement and likelihood of dementia was recently conducted by the French government. The results are
surprising, and it should cause all of us to reevaluate what we’ve been taught
about retirement. Here is summary of
the findings:

"People who delay
retirement have less risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia, and researchers say the conclusion makes sense. Working tends to
keep people physically active, socially connected and mentally challenged – all
things known to help prevent mental decline.

‘For each additional year
of work, the risk of getting dementia is reduced by 3.2 percent,’ said Carole
Dufouil, a scientist at INSERM, the French government’s health research agency.

About 35 million people
worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S.,
about 5 million have Alzheimer’s – 1 in 9 people aged 65 and over. What causes
the mind-robbing disease isn’t known and there is no cure or any treatments
that slow its progression.

France has had some of the
best Alzheimer’s research in the world, partly because its former
president, Nicolas Sarkozy, made it a priority. The country also has detailed health records
on self-employed people who pay into a Medicare-like health system.

Researchers used these
records on more than 429,000 workers, most of whom were shopkeepers or
craftsmen such as bakers and woodworkers. They were 74 on average and had been
retired for an average of 12 years.

Nearly 3 percent had
developed dementia but the risk of this was lower for each year of age at
retirement. Someone who retired at 65 had about a 15 percent lower risk of
developing dementia compared to someone retiring at 60, after other factors
that affect those odds were taken into account.

To rule out the possibility
that mental decline may have led people to retire earlier, researchers did
analyses that eliminated people who developed dementia within 5 years of
retirement, and within 10 years of it.

The trend is exactly the same, suggesting that work was having an
effect on cognition, not the other way around. France mandates retirement in
various jobs – civil servants must retire by 65, The new study suggests people
should work as long as they want because it may have health benefits.

June Springer, who just turned 90, thinks it does. She was hired
as a full-time receptionist at Caffi Plumbing & Heating in Alexandria, Va.,
eight years ago.

‘I’d like to give credit to the company for hiring me at that age,’
she said. ‘It’s a joy to work, being with people and keeping up with current
events. I love doing what I do. As long as God grants me the brain to use I’ll
take it every day.’

Heather Snyder, director of medical and scientific operations for
the Alzheimer’s Association, said the study results don’t mean everyone needs
to delay retirement.

‘It’s more staying cognitively active, staying socially active,
continue to be engaged in whatever it is that’s enjoyable to you’ that’s
important, she said.

‘My parents are retired but they’re busier than ever. They’re
taking classes at their local university, they’re continuing to attend lectures
and they’re continuing to stay cognitively engaged and socially engaged in
their lives.’"

In our society, we are taught that giving up work and retiring
is the pathway to the “good years.” I even know some people who are counting down
the days until they retire!

Are they in essence counting down the days until they begin
their decline? Is retirement even natural for our minds and bodies? Retirement
typically means focusing on one’s own personal happiness and pleasure. Perhaps
we weren't meant to make a full time job of doing that.

In any case, it reminds us that your senior agents need to think
twice about getting out of the business.

Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.

Situational Leadership in the Recruiting Process

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Occasionally,
a book is written that sums up something so obvious it clarifies much of what
we know and already do well. At the same
time, it inspires us to strive to perfect those very same things.

Ken
Blanchard’s classic The One-Minute Manager developed some ideas about differing
management styles that continue to inform me in a variety of circumstances, not
just at work. Read the following excerpt
from an article addressing Blanchard's ideas and think through its implications
on the entire recruitment, hiring, and training process of a new agent
hire.

"Situational
leadership is a term developed by Ken Blanchard. As a situational leader you are
able to adapt your leadership style to fit the situation of your team member or
employee. This means you can deploy four different leadership styles depending
on the situation.

As you
assess which style is needed, you need to make a conscious choice about which
of your own behaviors is needed. With directive behavior, you provide
structure, control and close supervision for the people who need it. With
supportive behavior, you use praise and two-way communication to facilitate the
work of your team.

Blanchard
sees four leadership styles growing out of combinations of supportive and
directive behavior: directing style, coaching style, supporting style and
delegating style.

In 'directing' style, the emphasis is on control and close supervision of the
worker. In 'coaching' style, the leader provides more explanation of what the
job entails and solicits suggestions while still staying in control of the
situation. With 'supporting' style, there is a team approach between the leader
and follower with the leader emphasizing support of the follower rather than control.
Finally, in 'delegating' style, the leader turns over responsibility to the
worker.

When I
coach people on how to use Situational Leadership I usually talk to them about
their own evolution in their current organization. I usually say, 'During your
first week, how did you feel? You were likely excited and a little anxious. You
also wanted to know what you were expected to do and shown how to do it.' You
needed your supervisor to be using a ‘Directing’ leadership style.

Most of
us evolve in our careers from needing Directing leadership at the beginning and
then Coaching, then Supporting, and finally Delegating leadership when we
become experienced and reliable.

Of
course people develop at different rates and the Situational Leader needs to
know where each person is in their evolution in order to determine what type of
leadership they need. As Blanchard describes in his work, the level of a
person’s development is measured by assessing their ‘competence and commitment’.

Competence
is the level of a person’s knowledge and skills as they relate to doing their
job. Commitment, on the other hand, is the level of the person’s confidence and
motivation. Most leaders find Commitment to be the most difficult to assess.

Success
in leadership comes when the leadership style is matched with the
characteristics of the follower. Problems
with leadership come when the leadership style does not fit the follower."

What struck me about the relevance of situational
leadership to the recruitment process is the evolution from the very first
contact. The recruiting professionals who are skilled at switching from one
style to another and back again quickly are most successful. Why?
The savviest recruits may need each style.

Also when the recruiting process is shared across
multiple roles in an organization, it is also important to pass this leadership
information on to others in chain of contact.
This allows each new phone calll /interview to begin in the right framework rather
than backtracking and repeating what others have already done.

Question: What styles do you find yourself naturally
using the most? What relevance is it to be aware of these variations?

Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.

Selling the Invisible For Recruiting

Helping People Transition from a Traditional Part-Time Job to a Full-Time Real Estate Agent—Part 3

Helping People Transition from a Traditional Part-Time Job to a Full-Time Real Estate Agent—Part 2

Helping People Transition from a Traditional Part-Time Job to a Full-Time Real Estate Agent

Use It or Lose It: Important Research for Older Agents to Consider

Situational Leadership in the Recruiting Process

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