If you want to boost the productivity and growth of your real estate brokerage, then you need to be able to recruit the best real estate agents. Indeed, investing in hiring quality candidates is good for business because of the overall value they provide to your organization.
As such, it’s important to beef up your recruitment programs so that you can gain an edge over the competition. Fortunately, this is an achievable goal thanks to real estate recruitment technology. With the help of these tools, you can streamline your processes and improve your strategies so you can more easily find top-performing agents.
That said, here are some tech tools that you definitely need to invest in as a real estate recruiter:
Recruitment CRMs
A recruitment CRM or candidate relationship management system/software is one of the foremost technological tools that a real estate recruiter needs. It’s a little similar to an ATS or an applicant tracking system; however, while an ATS is focused mainly on the current applications, a CRM is like a central database of past, present, active, and passive candidates.
You can learn more about how real estate recruiters can maximize a CRM and help brokerages achieve success in the given link. The bottomline here is that with the help of a CRM, real estate recruiters can be more strategic and proactive in finding and hiring real estate agents.
Job Aggregators
If you want your job ads to be found, then you need to advertise in job aggregators. You usually have two choices in this: industry-specific job sites or the more “general” job boards. Each type of job aggregator has its own pros and cons; study them carefully in order to maximize each platform. You should also be aware of how each site’s algorithm works, so that you can create optimized job ads.
The bottomline is that many job seekers—real estate agents included—often start their search online. Thus, you need to be present on these websites if you want to be found and capture the attention of potential recruits.
Finally, do note that while a job aggregator isn’t a tool that you can buy (unlike, say, a CRM software), it’s an absolute must to know how to use it. By mastering how to utilize a job aggregator’s features, your job ads can be found by the best candidates.
Video Interviewing
The COVID pandemic made video conferencing and online meetings the norm, not just for work-related purposes but also for recruitment. Indeed, thanks to video interviewing tools and chat apps, real estate recruiters can save precious time when it comes to evaluating candidates.
Most real estate recruiters prefer live video interviews, but there’s also merit in implementing pre-recorded video interviewing. This is where you send the questions to the candidates, and then they respond by sending you a video of their answers. It’s an ideal process if you have plenty of candidates for a single position.
Of course, nothing beats the in-person interviews if you want to gauge a person’s body language and get a good “feel” if a candidate will be a good fit or add to the brokerage’s culture. Nevertheless, video interviewing is a good compromise.
Digital Sourcing Platforms
One of the biggest challenges in real estate recruitment is finding candidates in the first place. Where do you search? Networking through industry events is a great place to start, but depending on this sourcing method is severely limiting. You’re going to need to cast a wider net if you want to catch the attention of the best real estate agents in the market.
This is where digital sourcing platforms come in. Through social media, digital job boards, and community forums, you’ll have a bigger pool of potential candidates to work with. A particularly good avenue is social media, simply because millions of people are already using these platforms. Because the presence of an audience is no longer that much of an issue, you can then focus your efforts on optimizing your content to appeal to your target section of the market.
Reference Checkers
Checking your candidates’ references is a time-consuming but necessary task. After all, you want to be as sure as possible that you’re hiring the right person for your brokerage. Fortunately, there are now tools that can automate this process.
The way reference checkers work is that they cross-reference readily available information with the information provided by the candidate in their resumes. Some tools also let you input custom keywords, so you can further narrow down your candidate pool.
Chatbots
Last but certainly not least, chatbots are an important technological solution in real estate recruitment. From cutting down interviewing time to keeping candidates engaged, chatbots can help you streamline your hiring process and find qualified real estate agents that much quicker.
The key is to know how to phrase the default options or questions in the chatbot program so that it will actually be helpful instead of confusing or frustrating.
With these six tech tools, you can considerably improve your recruitment process and find the best real estate agents to join your brokerage.