What is HiringCenter?
Poor recruiting performance usually stems from a shortage of candidates. It is difficult to be selective when there are not enough candidates from which to choose. When this happens, recruiting goals go unmet or hiring standards are lowered to compensate.
HiringCenter is a turn-key recruiting system that ensures your company gets a constant flow of new candidates. The HiringCenter methodologies produce results because they are based on proven marketing technologies that have been benchmarked in media markets across the country.
HiringCenter is a Recruiting Process Management System
Most companies create business systems around their most critical business processes. To keep track of finances, they create a financial system. To keep track of inventory, they create an inventory management system. To keep track of payroll, they create a payroll management system, etc.
These business systems may not be very complex, and some of the systems can even be handled with pen and paper. Nonetheless, a system is created and followed for each important business process in a successful company.
Typically, the only exception to this rule is the recruiting process. Even though most real estate companies would classify recruiting as the "lifeblood of their company" and their people as their "most valuable asset," they handle recruiting in an ad hoc manner.
HiringCenter is a turn-key recruitment process management system. It consolidates haphazard recruiting tasks performed by various people in an organization into a single framework designed to produce accountability in an organization. The framework is supported by a web-based software platform that benchmarks every point in the recruiting process.
HiringCenter Helps You Engage Both New and Experienced Agents
Most real estate companies want to hire a mix of new and experienced agents. With the average age of real estate agents in the United States now exceeding 50 years old, new agents will be needed to replace those retiring over the next decade.
Capturing talented individuals who have experienced some initial success with a competitor is also a common tactic for growing a real estate company. Since most highly successful real estate agents become high producers with their second or third broker, this talent pool is not something that can be ignored.
HiringCenter helps your company engage both new and experienced agent candidates. By customizing the marketing message to each group of prospective agents, both channels can be optimized for the highest return.
HiringCenter is also a Candidate Marketing System
Nothing is more frustrating than putting time, effort, and resources into recruiting tools that do not meet expectations. Unless candidates are proactively driven to your company, even the best tools remain underutilized and produce poor results.
HiringCenter ensures that your recruiting message receives the widest exposure possible inside your media market. Everything is measured and nothing is left to chance. The venues that are not producing are cut quickly to save resources. The venues that show promise are optimized to produce the highest return on your advertising investment. This type of focus and attention results in hundreds of thousands of brand impressions for your company.
HiringCenter Professionally Executes Your Candidate Marketing
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 30% of workers in the United States are engaged in some mode of job search. Most of these people are using the internet to research employment opportunities and serendipitously learn about a wide variety of companies and opportunities.
Getting your message in front of these semi-active candidates is important, but it can be very expensive - especially if your organization has limited experience using internet-based employment venues and limited time to focus on such activities.
HiringCenter manages your company's candidate advertising budget on your behalf. We write the ads, place the ads, rotate the ads, and metric the performance of the ads on a daily basis.
On a monthly basis, HiringCenter Marketing Assistants perform thousands of advertising tasks on behalf of our clients all over the country. This level of intense focus allows us to optimize the money that your organization is spending on candidate advertising. In addition, it creates a set of sourcing metrics that drive better recruitment process decisions.
HiringCenter Reduces Your Candidate Advertising Costs and Risk
The cost of candidate advertising is heavily influenced by volume purchasing. Internet advertising venues commonly offer discounts of 50% to 80% off normal prices for companies who are willing to commit to high purchase volumes and long-term contracts.
HiringCenter aggregates the purchasing power of companies all across the country. By combining your company's advertising dollars with those from other companies, your company can experience the volume discounts normally reserved for large organizations. Because the risk is spread among many smaller companies, the reduced fee structures can be offered to HiringCenter clients on a month-to-month basis. This arrangement lowers the risk assumed by HiringCenter clients so that they do not become caught in long term contracts they later cannot afford.
Combining professional execution with reduced advertising price points has helped HiringCenter clients significantly reduce their advertising cost per candidate. In one case study where consistent before and after pricing and traffic data was available, HiringCenter reduced the client's advertising costs from $38/candidate to $3.09/candidate. By passing the advertising savings on to our clients, many organizations are able to fund a large portion of the HiringCenter service through increased efficiencies.
HiringCenter Allows Candidates to "Dip Their Toe" Into Your Company to Initiate the Hiring Process
The traditional model of real estate hiring is too risky for a large majority of candidates. The premise of quitting one's job, going months without income, and working on full commission in an industry where more than 80% of new hires wash out within the first 12 months is not a "first step" many people are willing to take when changing careers.
The most talented people are often the most cautious. The candidates who have above average skills and abilities usually have lots of options. For these people, a real estate career must be weighed alongside other possibilities.
Experienced agents working for competitors assume risk in leaving what they know and find familiar. Granted, an agent may be experiencing problems with their current broker, but how can a candidate determine if problems will not be duplicated in a new environment?
HiringCenter answers the most prominent question candidates have in their mind when considering a change of employment: "Would I be a good fit in your organization?"
By taking a quick 10-minute assessment, HiringCenter is a able to map the "core capacities" of a candidate. This feedback is immediately given to candidates after they complete the assessment. It describes their unique recipe of strengths and gives them insight into how they can best use those strengths to make a meaningful contribution in the workforce.
In turn, each candidate's core capacities are compared to a unique profile that has been developed for your organization. The profile characterizes the type of agents who flourish inside your company's unique business system. In a follow-up discussion, your managers are equipped to engage the most promising candidates with meaningful information concerning their potential in your company.
Not All Assessments are Created Equal
There are thousands of personality, behavioral, and other psychological assessments available on the internet today. The purpose of a given assessment, the validity of the measurements, the usability of the instrument, and the usefulness of the reporting are all important factors in assessment design and implementation.
When choosing an assessment, the choices can be overwhelming and confusing to a company that has little experience in this area. The following questions can help you avoid the legal, ethical, and financial pitfalls of selecting an assessment for your company:
1. What Are You Trying to Measure? Detecting and quantifying a job candidate's "organic wiring" and mapping that against the "organic wiring" of the existing top performers can be an effective way of predicting future performance.
2. Is the Assessment Legal? Select an assessment that has been designed specifically for business use and certified by an independent party to meet the EEOC requirements.
3. Is the Assessment Reliable? Make sure the assessment produces repeatable results. Otherwise, the data it produces is suspect and should not be used to make hiring decisions. Ask for reliability metrics, and then look carefully at who did the validation study.
4. Is the Assessment Burdensome to the Employee or Candidate? Most complaints come from long assessments. If all other quality factors are equal, choose a shorter assessment.
5. Does the Assessment Produce Measurable Business Improvements? Ask for the hard metrics like revenue, profit and cost of labor. And, do not accept excuses. Case studies are a good start, but a longitudinal study allows real ROI calculations to be made.
If your company chooses a poor assessment, the first to notice will be candidates who visit your recruiting site. Of course, they won't tell you directly, they'll let you know through poor conversion rates and a lack of referral traffic.
"Canned" Sourcing Profiles Diminish Results
The primary question candidates have in their mind when considering a change of employment is: "Would I be a good fit in your organization?"
In order to answer this question, many assessment companies suggest comparing a candidate's assessment results to a "canned" sourcing profile. A "canned" profile is one that has been developed using aggregate assessment data collected from a number of companies. The question becomes more generalized: "Would you be a good fit in the real estate industry?"
This tactic is fraught with problems. A sourcing profile developed in this manner makes the assumption that a person will flourish as a real estate agent regardless of their location, company, business systems, support structures, culture, etc. It predicates its validity on the premise that the top performing agents at Remax in Gulfport, MS; at Prudential in Manhattan; and at Century 21 in San Diego; are all "wired" basically the same. In essence, a real estate agent is a real estate agent no matter where they work.
There is a substantial body of research demonstrating this premise to be false. Our organization evaluated similar companies in the same metro area where the profile of the top performing members of each company are significantly different. We had many owners tell us that the type of person who flourishes in their organization is different than the type of person who flourishes in their competitors' organizations.
HiringCenter creates a unique sourcing profile for each of our clients. The sourcing profile is based on validated assessment data collected from your organization. The profile is recalibrated every 12 to 18 months to ensure that changes to your company's business processes are accounted for in the profile.
Using a "canned" profile diminishes results in two ways:
1. It dilutes your company's marketing message. Being able to state that you've studied your own high performing agents and you know what type of people flourish in your unique environment is much more powerful and convincing than trying to make the case that a person is a general good fit for the real estate industry.
2. It does not allow your company to legitimately answer the primary question candidates have when changing careers ("Would I be a good fit in your organization?"). High quality candidates can tell when they're being shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all hiring system.
Recruiting Gimmicks Damage Your Company's Brand Reputation
In marketing language, a gimmick is a unique or quirky special feature that is designed to make something "stand out" from its contemporaries. However, the special feature is typically thought to be of little relevance or use. [1]
Some of the recruiting tactics deployed by real estate companies to attract the attention of candidates have the look and feel of gimmicks. These tactics include simulations, cartoons, animated graphics, "everybody's a winner" assessments, and other such things.
Using gimmicky recruiting tools can hurt your company by causing high-quality candidates to ignore or filter-out your recruiting messages. That's bad enough, but there is also a risk that a potential client will question your company's professionalism if these tactics are prominently used on a website or in advertising copy.
HiringCenter does not use gimmicks to attract candidates. There are high-quality individuals who legitimately want to learn if they'd be a fit in a particular company. However, they must be engaged with a recruiting process that respects their intelligence and talents. When something in the recruiting process doesn't "feel right" the best candidates are the first to disengage. The only ones left are those who don't know any better.
HiringCenter produces millions of brand impressions for our clients every year. The recruiting tools are built to support the outstanding brands and reputations of the companies we support. Not every candidate will become an agent, but they all have the potential to become customers. Allowing a branding discrepancy between your company's recruiting process and the delivery of your company's real estate services is not good business.