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Assessing Personnel Needs
Advanced-Beyond Job Descriptions: Job Matching for Real Estate Sales
Recruitment Planning
Advanced: What Top Performers Want from You
Recruiting Salespeople
Advanced: Tips for Recruiting the Seasoned Professional
Recruiting Support Personnel
Advanced: The Family and Medical Leave Act
The Interviewing Process
Advanced: Behavioral Interviewing
Tips for Selecting a Psychological Test
Structuring Compensation
Advanced: Compensation Tips for Management Personnel | | Interviewing, like sales, is a learned process. You may be naturally good at taking to people, but if you succeed as a real estate salesperson, you learn to listen between the lines, to ask the hard questions, and to assess personality. Many of these same skills will serve you well in the interview process.
Developing Evaluation Criteria
TIP: Listing the top criteria you will use to judge job candidates and then rating each of the candidates will help make your final hiring decision easier.
10 Hiring Factors—And How to Recognize Them
Use these or similar questions to help you recognize qualities that make a top performer.
Initiative: The ability to tackle and solve challenging situations.
Ask: "What do you do to make your job easier or more rewarding?" OR "Tell me about a time that you had a buyer who was having trouble finding a mortgage and you did."
Self-reliance: The ability to make decisions and the judgement to know when to ask for advice.
Ask: "Describe an issue on which you might ask your supervisor for help." OR "What constraints do you face in performing your job, and how do cope with them?"
Judgement: The ability to evaluate alternative and reach a logical conclusion.
Ask: "What was the most difficult decision you made in the last six months and how did you arrive at it?" OR "What procedure do you follow when you face a complicated problem?"
Flexibility: The ability to adapt to change.
Ask: "Give me an example of how you worked successfully with a client whose personality irritated you." OR "How do you set priorities for your job?"
Goal orientation: The ambition to achieve and the direction to work toward specific, achievable goals.
Ask: "If you had spare time on the job, what would you do?" OR "What do you consider your job strengths and how do you capitalize on them?"
Ethical: The commitment to act honestly and with integrity.
Ask: "Describe a time when you saw a peer doing something you thought was questionable ethically. What did you do?" OR "How far are you willing to compromise your personal standards to make a sale?"
Energy: The drive and motivation to get things done.
Ask: "How do you catch up on a backlog of material?" OR "When do you tend to do your best work? Your worst work?"
Verbal communication skills: The ability to interact effectively with clients and peers.
Ask: "How do you react when someone tries to dominate a discussion?" OR "What's the worst communication problem you've encountered?"
Work standards: The commitment to quality performance.
Ask: "How would you define doing a good job?" OR "Describe a situation in which you were satisfied with your performance. Why?"
Work experience: Past jobs that developed or demonstrated the skills needed for real estate sales.
Ask: "Which accomplishments are you most proud of in your current job?" OR "What did you like best/least about your previous job? About your previous company?"
TIP: If you're interviewing a person with little or no work experience, ask them to give examples from volunteer activities, team activities, or relations with friends and family.
Prescreening Practices
- Not every job candidate is worth the time for a face-to-face interview.
- Review applications and resumes carefully to assess candidates experience, education, and employment gaps.
TIP: Watch for excessive "job jumping," several jobs in a row of one year or less; such a patten may be indicate inadequate skills or unrealistic job expectations. Watch for phrases like "had exposure to" or "assisted with" because the person may not have actually done the work and performed the tasks
- Education—A resume says "attended" rather than "graduated" could mean that a candidate lacks a degree
- Conduct a phone screening—Verify employment dates and experience, ask questions to weed out candidates who don't like the hours, location, salary, and so forth of the job.
TIP: Use the prescreening phone call to evaluate an applicant's telephone skills.
- Measure the candidates' verbal communication skills and enthusiasm.
Adapted from The Cost of Bad Hiring Decisions & How to Avoid Them, Carol A. Hacker, HR Focus, October 1997
Tips for Conducting a Better Interview> | |
Keep It Legal
Using rating sheets that score each applicant (perhaps between 1 and 10) on the same criteria, and then keeping those sheets in your personal files could help you defend yourself against charges of discrimination.
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