What is Crock Pot Recruiting?

Friday, October 26, 2012

Everyone has heard the saying "If it
were easy, everyone would do it." A couple of years ago, Ben wrote a
great piece on the difference between microwave and crock pot recruiting
that closely follows this principle.

Every tool and philosophy we espouse at
Tidemark is built upon this central principle. It is not surprising that 95% of
our clients hold to this principle as well. They have an underlying conviction
that in order to see results tomorrow, they must consistently engage in
systematic and seamless steps today. It's understood that
"microwave" recruiting will only obtain low hanging fruit that
competitors are also vying for. Conversely, "crock pot" recruiting
may take more time and discipline, but, over time, yields the higher caliber
and supplemental fruit that companies need in order to beat the
competition.

The differences in the conversations of a microwave
recruiter and the conversations of a crock pot recruiter resemble two
entirely different languages. A microwave recruiter typically offers anecdotal
excuses, usually with no statistics, regarding why they aren’t achieving their
goals. When asked a statistical question, the microwave recruiter will usually
give you an anecdotal answer. When asked how many candidates it takes to get
ten interviews…or how many interviews it takes to get each hire, a microwave
recruiter is usually unable to provide numbers. What do they provide instead?
More excuses. Why? Because a microwave recruiter does not track methods or
results.

What isn't measured cannot be managed,
predicted, or improved upon. However, recording and tracking results doesn’t
come naturally to most people. I often fall into the common trap of not
measuring what I do, or how I spend my time. And guess what? That’s invariably
when I’m not accomplishing much.

Now, don't get me wrong…there are always
factors that change percentages and numbers from one cycle to the next. There
is a time and place to dissect reasons and interpret the changes in percentages,
however, making excuses with no grounding in metrics is typically used as an
attempt to avoid accountability.

Discipline is the key to tracking and keeping
records. Disciplined people and organizations rarely offer excuses. They
implement systems to drive, track, and improve performance.

Discipline is
defined as:

1. Training expected to produce a specific
character or pattern of behavior.

2. Controlled behavior resulting from
training.

3. A set of rules or methods.

4. Activity, exercise, or a regimen that
develops or improves a skill.

5. Behavior in accord with rules of conduct;
behavior and order maintained by training and control.

6. A set or system of rules and regulations.

Two years ago, I wrote a four-part piece on an
expert recruiter (Andy Nazaroff) who clearly exercises discipline (1,2,3,4). He provides specifics regarding
calls, interviews, information, timing, conduct, etc… all of these methods
amount to consistent and impressive success.

For him and others like him, a belief system
is at the core of their success. They believe that discipline drives results,
and increases responsibility — two characteristics of every successful
company.

Let me know your thoughts and your own methods
for assuring your own discipline.

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. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

Tidemark Online Community: Dipping Your Toe Into a Private Social Network

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Over the last few weeks, we’ve focused significant time and dialog on the topic of social media. In the process, we’ve attempted to give you insight concerning an up and coming business trend—the widespread use of private social networks for business applications.

If you’re new to the conversation, you may want to read a few of the previous posts on this topic. Visit WorkPuzzle and scroll back through the discussions over the last month or so. It won’t take long to catch up.

In my personal conversations with readers over the last few weeks, I've noticed there still seems to be a little confusion and concern about how all this “private social network stuff" works. If you are confused, don’t feel discouraged. Emerging technologies will always feel awkward and intimidating at first, but will later seem less frightening and even routine (you probably don’t get concerned about opening up your email, right?).

How do you get over the initial awkwardness of new technology? One way is to join a private social network as a user before running a network (a virtual office) by yourself.

And that is exactly what we are offering you today.

I'd like to personally invite each of you to join the Tidemark Online Community as a way of “dipping your toe” into the concept of a private social network.

I promise you, joining is relatively painless (it takes about 3 minutes to create your profile) and you can control your involvement and privacy. By joining our online community you’ll experience a little bit of how we do business at Tidemark.

Now keep in mind—Tidemark is not a real estate company. Some of the issues that we work on in the virtual office do not directly translate to the ideal real estate virtual office. However, by joining and participating in our private social network, you’ll start to see how becoming a community manager of a virtual real estate office could work for you.

To get started, click on the link below. We look forward to seeing you on the virtual side of Tidemark.

Join the Tidemark Online Community

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. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

RecruitingSocial: The Manager’s Role in a Virtual Office–Part 2

Thursday, October 18, 2012

We have been writing about the importance of developing a virtual office by establishing your own private social network that becomes your "homebase" on the internet.

Having a virtual office changes the way you interact with your agents, vendors, community, and even competitive agents you are trying to recruit. We have written far too much over the past month to accurately summarize here, so you may want to read the previous posts before reading this excerpt.

In the last edition, Ben listed the two most common questions we hear:

1. What is the manager’s role in the virtual office?

and

2. With all the responsibilities a manager already has, how can this significant responsibility be added to an already full plate?

Ben answered question 1–it is my job to answer question 2.

Before I answer question 2, I want to remind you of a manager survey we conducted in September of last year.

When we asked managers to list, in the order of priority, the tasks at the core of their job description, the following results were very clear– recruiting was number one, followed by retention, then training and building office culture, then coaching agents, and finally deal-doctoring.

When asked in the same survey what managers thought they did best, only 6% of the managers answered "recruiting". Clearly there is a disconnect between stated priority and the desire to perform stated priority.

Here's the point: The survey showed a need for a method to better align the expectations of executive management with the day-to-day performance of the manager.

This got us thinking… perhaps there is a better way to wrap all of the above priorities into one common platform that would make recruiting feel more natural rather than a chore that most managers seem to despise.

While the "work" or recruiting will never disappear completely, what if the execution of the recruiting tasks could be mostly done as a natural extension of ongoing conversations within the normal office dialogue?

This is the goal of RecruitingSocial.

So, let's get back to the question–how do you add something like managing a virtual office to your plate if you're already maxed out?

Like any duty, you must rank its level of importance. Once a duty is ranked, you must follow through and devote the appropriate amount of time to the duty in order meet your goals.

How many people truly spend the first two hours of their day working on their most important tasks? In interviewing thousands of people as a psychologist, I have found that most people don't.

I would recommend changing your daily routine so that your first and most productive hours are focused on completing your higher ranked duties.

Here is a suggested framework:

Step 1: Spend 30 minutes scanning email and only responding to urgent items.

Step 2: Turn off email and other distractions. Focus for 2-3 hours on completing your highest ranked duties.

Step 3: Take a lunch break away from your desk. Leaving your computer and recharging is the key to being productive after hard focus on your most important duties.

Step 4: Devote the second half of your day to taking care of ongoing tasks and other reactionary work that requires less mental stamina.

RecruitingSocial centralizes the duties that are, in most cases, highly ranked. And, it offers the ability to complete a lot of highly ranked duties in one central platform.

It is our hope that RecruitingSocial will soon be a part of your daily routine. In our next blog, we'll show you how you can start dipping your toe in and seeing how this works.

RecruitingSocial: The Manager’s Role in a Virtual Office–Part 1

Friday, October 12, 2012

The rationale behind RecruitingSocial is that experienced agent recruiting will be much more effective (in general) if you allow competitive agents to become involved with your team before you ask them to leave their current broker.

The traditional recruiting model of coaxing individuals to make a change from a position of dissatisfaction (i.e. “You’re unhappy with your current situation, come work with me and life will be better…”) will always be an uphill battle. A person has to be in a lot of pain to make a change under these circumstances.

A better way is to initially let candidates experience and gain benefit from your organization as part of their normal business activities–this makes conceptualizing a change seem much more natural. In essence, you’re encouraging competitive agents to test-drive (become involved in) your organization before making a new commitment.

This involvement is called collaboration, and it is something that is very compelling to the up-and-coming generation of agents. You will also find that it is interesting to seasoned agents who are embracing new technologies to remain competitive.

As Dave mentioned earlier this week, the best place for this type of collaboration to happen is in a virtual office. While physical offices will remain an important part of any real estate company, collaboration that includes a broad range of participants will not typically happen there. Technology has equipped conversations to take place outside the physical realm, and this is where the water is flowing downhill.

A couple of questions we’re starting to hear frequently as we share ideas about virtual offices powered by private social networks are…

1. “What is the manager’s role in the virtual office?”

and

2. “With all the responsibilities the manager already has, how can this significant responsibility be added to an already full plate?”

To answer the first question, I believe it is important to understand the reason a competitive agent would potentially be interested in collaborating with your organization–especially if that collaboration happened inside the safety of a private social network.

Master Burnett, a social networking thought leader at BraveNewTalent, recently documented the following trends concerning how talented individuals are now using social networks in the workplace:

Social Networks are becoming the new “meeting places” for even local citizens.
Social Networks are becoming the backbone of the modern support system.
Social Networks are where content gets discovered.
Social Networks are where discussions happen (whether you participate or not).
Social Networks are where perceptions are formed, vetted, and cemented.

Let these discoveries sink in for a few minutes…

If this type of information is really starting to flow between individuals in the real estate industry along social networking pipelines, there is a huge advantage to becoming a significant node in this information exchange. You’ll never be the center of the information exchange (social networking doesn’t work that way), but your goal should be for your private social network to become an important meeting place for these discussions to take place.

So what is your role as a manager? The best analogy I’ve heard on this topic is to think of yourself as a gardener. What do gardeners do?

1. Gardeners plan. How do you want your social network to look when it is full grown? What groups and topics would make your social network interesting? What areas would need more of your personal attention than others? If you start small, how do you plan to expand the boundaries of your garden?

2. Gardeners plant. With an initial framework in place, think about how to seed your groups and discussion so they can get off to a good start. This can mean getting advocates (perhaps existing agents or staff members) to take responsibility for certain groups and discussion topics.

3. Gardeners weed. In every social network, there are discussions that need some moderation and oversight from someone in charge (remember this is a private network that you own). While the idea is not to be authoritarian or heavy-handed, it does help to have someone shape discussions when they become unruly.

4. Gardeners harvest and replant. Every discussion eventually has a natural end. Someone needs to be responsible for pulling the plug and re-starting discussions that are relevant and interesting. Without constant replanting, the whole network dies.

Now for question #2 — How can the typical over-worked real estate manager make all this happen?

We’ll have to put this off until the next blog. I will tell you this—it is not as hard as you might imagine, and many real estate managers are a natural fit for the tasks required to be successful at this. Stay tuned…

RecruitingSocial: 4 Reasons You Need a Virtual Office

Monday, October 08, 2012

Over the last month, we have built a very strong
foundation to support the fact that social media is here to stay and have described how our clients can best utilize this trend to increase market share. In the last two
editions (1, 2), Ben announced our new solution, why we chose to invest in it, and how
we believe it will help you recruit, manage, and lead the real estate industry in this
new direction.

There was a day when your brick and mortar
office was your complete identity. It was your castle…your fort. It was the
only place that your troops gathered for strategy and inspiration, as well as
the place they assembled to perform the majority of their work. This is slowly becoming
less and less the case. People, especially young professionals, are increasingly
mobile and have more access to the things they need outside the office. They are also
quite tied to their social media platforms, in general. The internet has changed
the game, and within the most innovative companies, social media has changed
marketing, communication, collaboration, and recruiting.

While many smaller companies are trying to find
a way to capture the benefits of this trend with Facebook, Twitter, and
Pinterest, they continue to be frustrated with the results of these endeavors. Why?

Ben described it well in his last article… You
as a manager, won't benefit from the above platforms unless you have a way for
everything to point back to not only you personally, and not only your company,
but to your individual office and the people within it.

First, imagine that you have your own online office
where much of the collaboration, inspiration, problem solving, daily tips, and
success stories could be communicated. Now, imagine that outside agents,
vendors, customers, and clients were able not only to see inside some of the
collaboration of your office, but they could join in on some of it as well. THIS is
what the bigger companies are doing, and we're betting this is how the younger
generation will strive to go about their work.

Don't get me wrong, brick and mortar offices will
always be necessary for a variety of reasons…but your online representation of
your office and all of its communication and collaboration will be a key
ingredient to attracting, retaining, and collaborating with the best and the brightest.

So, here are four reasons why you need to seriously
consider an online social media office:

1. You need your own online TURF. As Ben
mentioned in the last edition – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networking sites should be
used solely as your outposts and embassies, all pointing back to your turf…your
office.

2. To build new channels for collaboration.
Imagine your agents pitching in (in real time) to help someone with an
urgent question or problem.

3. To create value. Imagine
developing a network of customers, vendors, and perhaps outside agents that
you've been trying to recruit, and leveraging their collective brainpower to
explore and develop new ideas.

4. To Recruit. Agents want to get a
glimpse of your culture. They want to have conversations with agents, look
around, and perhaps even develop some ongoing dialogue in order to see the dynamics of your office and how you and your agents think before signing on. This is one powerful way of accomplishing that.

Karl Moore, of Forbes summarizes this trend
well:

"The benefits of collaboration networks
are limitless. These networks breed co-creation, shared value, and cultures of
collaboration that can be leveraged beyond the network. The new generation
of Millennials and Generation C (connected,
computerized, and community-oriented) have fully adopted the collaborative mindset
as their own. They are educated, interactive, and collaborative, and have grown
up using social networks as a tool for brainstorming and problem solving. This
reflects a broad shift in generational thinking that is taking place. The
broadcast generation from the industrial age is being met by a collaborative
generation from the new knowledge age. The old ways of staying within the four
walls to solve problems, guarding company information, and developing products,
services, and solutions in isolation are gone.

Companies that can create or participate in a collaborative
network and organize themselves to best leverage the benefits will enjoy a
competitive advantage. Companies of all sizes can start by setting up a network
of internal experts, suppliers, partners and customers."

And now you can too. If you haven't done so
already, scroll back to the last two editions (1, 2) and learn about the conception of what we now call "RecruitingSocial."

RecruitingSocial: The Need for a Private Social Network

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

As mentioned in the last post, Tidemark is in the process of
pre-launching RecruitingSocial—the new social media recruiting tool that
has been under development for the past few months.

As we constructed this tool, one of the business trends that we chose
to take advantage of was the introduction (and now aggressive growth)
of private social networks for business applications.

As you may know, there has been a “land grab” for technologies that
equip businesses to build and maintain private social networks. In
June, I wrote a detailed blog on this topic. If you don’t remember this
discussion, you may want to re-read it before digesting the rest of this
article.

In the private social networking arena, there are more than 50
companies that are all competing for attention in this (now) crowded
business demographic. As you might imagine, each company tries to
differentiate itself with a unique approach and focus, but the
over-arching theme is arming businesses to harness the promise of social networking technology.

The alternative to focusing on a private social network approach, is
to attempt to build tools that help managers make sense of and navigate
the major public social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Twitter. There are some outstanding companies that have consultancies
focused on this model. One such company is Social Media Examiner. It
is amazing the number of good ideas this company generates in the area
of marketing businesses on public social networks. There is much to
learn.

In developing RecruitingSocial, one of the early decisions we had to
make was whether to put our emphasis on a private social network
approach, or on public social network methodologies. Both concepts have
advantages and disadvantages, and both methodologies have compelling
examples of success.

We ended up choosing the private network approach because we believe
this gives the individual real estate manager a way of building a
platform that he/she can optimize for recruiting success.

So where does that leave public social networks in this process? We
believe that these environments are best used as support mechanisms for
a manager’s private social network.

Although we didn’t realize it at the time we conceptualized this
model, there were other thought leaders who were heading down the same
path. One of the individuals who does a great job of articulating this
philosophy is Michael Hyatt in his best-selling book, Platform: Get
Noticed in a Noisy World:

“A good social media strategy has three components:

1. A Homebase. This is a digital property you own and control. It is where your loyal fans gather. It can be as simple as a blog or as
complex as a self-hosted community. Regardless, it is where you direct
all internet traffic. Why? Because this is the place where you can best
sell your ideas or products. You control the borders and determine who
has access.

2. Embassies. These are places you don’t own, but where you
have a registered profile. In other words, you have a regular presence
on someone else’s property. You engage in conversations with those who
congregate there. Examples would include Facebook, Twitter, Linked In,
or even other blogs you follow. You generally need a “Passport”
(verified credentials) granted by the site owner to maintain residency
or participate in conversations.

3. Outposts. These are places you don’t own nor have a
regular presence. Instead, you simply listen into conversations about
you, your brand, your company, or topics that interest you. For example,
I have search columns in HootSuite that monitor mentions of both my
name and my company. I also have Google Alerts that monitor the same
information wherever it may occur on the Web.

The bottom line is that all the social media tools available fit into
one of these three buckets. If you are just involved in social media
for the sake of entertainment, you may not need a homebase. But if you
are serious about building a platform, that’s precisely where you need
to start. From there you can set up embassies and outposts.”

RecruitingSocial has been designed to be the “Homebase” for the real
estate manager who wants to develop a social media platform for engaging
competitive agents (candidates) in their local market.

Sound overwhelming? It would be if you had to conceptualize and build
everything yourself. That’s why RecruitingSocial was built—to
simplify the process of building and maintaining a social media platform
for your office.

In the upcoming blogs, we’ll discuss the details of how all this works.