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REALTOR® Emeritus | Hiring Personnel Recruiting Salespeople | | |||
|  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 | Finding and Identifying the Best Jim Kinney, CRB, GRI, president and broker of Rubloff Residential Properties in Chicago, talks about some of his recruiting strategies and the creative places where he finds candidates who have potential for success. Q: What are subtle signs that someone has potential to be a top-notch salesperson? Kinney: It's sort of funny, but sometimes I find that people with self-esteem issues are excellent salespeople because they're constantly working to prove themselves. They're driven and feel the need to be appreciated and often that appreciation is being recognized at what they do. They work not for the money but for the recognition. And I know if they work for the recognition, the money will come in. I've also found that people with teaching backgrounds are very good. They have nurturing personalities and often have very good planning skills because they're used to laying out lesson plans. Often a business plan or a plan to work with buyers or develop a marketing program for a seller meshes with the skills a teacher uses for lesson planning. Other good candidates are those in service businesses who have been successful and have abilities with people and good communication skills. You can be the smartest person in the world, but if you can't be warm and listen and communicate, you're not going to be a good salesperson. Q: What are some creative recruiting sources you rely on? Kinney: The best recruiting source is current salespeople. About one-third of my new hires have been clients, friends, and referrals from my sales associates. I also look to industries where people are used to asking for business but not getting compensated. The charity field is great. They don't think they're selling, but they are all the time because they're asking for large donations. If they're successful getting corporations to give them significant dollars, they have a tremendous base of contacts and obviously the skills to close a sale. The service industry—hotels and restaurants—is good farming for recruits. Think of someone who is a concierge at the Ritz. What a perfect fit for customer service. I think that's a hot button in our industry today—communication with the client and customer service. People who have high exposure to a lot of face-to-face contact have the temperament and personality that are pretty easily converted over to selling. Q: What red flags do you watch for that may indicate a person is going to be problematic or have an inability to succeed? Kinney: I do an awful lot on gut. If I see capabilities and no alarm bells are going off, but he or she doesn't seem like the right person, sometimes I'll take a chance. Some of the best salespeople have been turned down from first tries or told they'll never make it. I do try to scare people our of the business. There has to be a very strong understanding of what it means to work for a straight commission. I find that one of the weakest moves people make coming into real estate is not realizing the financial commitment it's going to take to get up and running—how much they need to put away to sustain themselves. I often counsel people to clean up their financial house and come back in one or two years because I've see some potentially good salespeople fall by the wayside because they've not been able to financially stay with it long enough for success to kick in. You can't focus on the business if you can't pay your bills. I listen clearly as to why leaving the job they're in to be sure they're not running away from something, but running to something. Right now with the economy, you find people coming to real estate because they heard you could make a lot of money. But do it for the right reasons. You can spend a lot of time and money training and when the market picks up they return to their former job. Why get invested heavily in training only to lose them? If they're coming to you, you want them for a career, not a hiatus. Q: What are your thoughts about actively recruiting top performers affiliated with competitors? Kinney: Top performers are smart enough to make a decision about where they're working. They'll move if they're dissatisfied with something. Top performers are making such high commission splits that it's hard to offer them more money. What kind of an offer am I going to make to a top performer to make him or her move? All I can do is push the overall image of my company on an ongoing basis so if ever they have a question, I'll be one of the people they'll call. We're in an industry where we're better off trying to work together rather than shoot each other. If you're knocking on colleagues' doors to steal people, it doesn't win you in the long run. Q: What about recruiting people new to the industry? Kinney: You have to be very careful about flooding the gates with a whole bunch of novices all at one time. The old timers may start to ask, "Doesn't this lower the image in the public's mind of the level of professionalism of the company?" If you are forced to do it because of need, you really need to work on training very quickly so you're not launching idiots out in the field. And I make clear that new salespeople should come to me with questions and problems vs. colleagues because I don't want them to have the feeling, "I don't want to train your people." Unlikely Places to Look for Real Estate Salespeople > | |