With the unemployment rate sitting around 3.6%, businesses are struggling to find enough employees to fit open jobs. In fact, 36% of small businesses reported that they couldn’t fill their open positions as of June 2018. Brokerages are no exception. Recruiting real estate agents has become harder than ever before.
Why Focus on Recruiting Real Estate Agents?
Now that brokerages are facing a candidate’s job market, it’s critical for them to update their recruiting strategy. Without a more modern, convenient experience for candidates, brokerages will simply miss out on quality real estate agents. With that in mind, many brokerages are turning to text recruiting to communicate with candidates in real-time through the channel they prefer.
Read on to learn how brokerages are recruiting real estate agents through business SMS.
Recruiting Real Estate Agents Tip #1: Answer Agent Questions
Most agents opt into text recruiting services because they are already interested in your brokerage and have questions about opportunities. One of the best ways to keep them interested is by answering their questions as quickly as possible.
Because texting is such a convenient channel, offering an SMS number for candidate questions is a great way to encourage candidates to text in—particularly when it comes to recruiting millennial real estate agents. All incoming candidate questions, no matter whether they’re sent through native SMS apps or over-the-top (OTT) apps like Facebook Messenger, arrive in your brokerage’s shared inbox. Each permissioned employee can see and answer messages, ensuring that no candidate queries slip through the cracks.
Because business text messages have a 98% open rate and an average response time of 90 seconds, brokerages can answer candidate questions far faster than they can through other channels, like email. This gives your brokerage an edge when it comes to recruiting real estate agents.
Recruiting Real Estate Agents Tip #2: Share Key Information with Recruits
When you’re recruiting experienced real estate agents—especially given the current hiring market—it’s critical to make it easy for them to learn about your job openings and business culture. A text recruiting service is a great way to share critical information.
Once candidates opt into your SMS service, you can start sending basic information, including:
- Brokerage support services
- Brokerage benefits
- Training programs
Make these texts as personal as possible so candidates know they’re in contact with a human, not a bot. Though it’s perfectly acceptable to text an opted-in candidate with this information, be sure to keep informative texts to a minimum. Send them on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Establishing a regular but sparse texting cadence is key to recruiting real estate agents successfully.
While sending information via text is great for recruiting experienced real estate agents, it’s also useful for recruiting millennial real estate agents, who are known to prefer SMS communications over email or phone.
Recruiting Real Estate Agents Tip #3: Begin the Interview Process
Eighty-three percent of professionals say that a negative interview experience might change their views about a company they previously liked. When your brokerage is recruiting real estate agents, streamline the interview process as much as possible to keep your candidates happy.
Brokerages can offer the following critical steps through text recruiting:
- Sending resumes and URLs to LinkedIn or web portfolios
- Scheduling phone or in-person interviews
- Providing any preliminary paperwork, like confidentiality forms
By managing the interview process through text recruiting, your business will make the process easier for candidates. Plus, if any questions arise through the process, candidates can easily contact you—instead of giving up on the application all together.
Recruiting Real Estate Agents Tip #4: Send Critical Reminders
Many of today’s agents are passive candidates, meaning that they already work with brokerages but are open to other opportunities. This means that the candidates you’re connecting with aren’t sitting around waiting for an interview—they’re squeezing meetings into their already busy schedules. This means that they can forget key things, like interview times and paperwork.
When you’re recruiting real estate agents through business SMS, you can send candidates reminders to a channel they’ll be sure to check; text messaging has a high 98% open rate.
Your brokerage can send reminders to a list of recipients in a single click. Your text recruiting platform will rely on merge tokens to draw information from each candidate’s custom fields. This allows the platform to personalize outgoing messages with key information like first names, job interest, and interview times.
Recruiting Real Estate Agents Tip #5: Stay in Touch
Some real estate agents simply aren’t a good fit for your brokerage at this moment in time. However, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be a good fit in the future, when you are recruiting real estate agents with their specific skills.
Maintaining a strong talent pool is a great way to ensure that you’ll have a great selection of candidates when a new role opens. To cultivate such a pool, encourage rejected applicants to stay in touch and remain on your text recruiting contact list.
Your brokerage can reach out on a monthly or biweekly basis with:
- Industry news
- Brokerage updates
- Your employees’ successful endeavors
- New open roles or positions
These simple messages will ensure that your talent pool feels close to your business. When you begin recruiting real estate agents for a new position, you’ll have a selection of key candidates who apply right away.
Still wondering how to recruit real estate agents? Drop us a line.
