Recruit like a Pro

PLACE Partners share their top tips to attract talent

Adelina Rotar, Jay White, Kimberlee Meserve and Jacqueline Smith

Recruiting is crucial to your business. Leveraging your team will be the key to your growth and success. Whether you’re a new PLACE Partner starting over alone or already growing an established team, you can learn from the successful recruitment strategies of PLACE Partners.

Adelina Rotar: Commit to your Zero

Owner/Operator, Austin, Texas

The first step of recruitment, no matter where you are in your career, is knowing your zero. Your zero is the baseline number of team members that you want to build initially and not fall below that number.

Adelina Rotar (Austin, TX) has a team of 23 with a zero of 20 agents. To maintain her zero, she spends two to three hours a week keeping talent in her pipeline. But in the beginning, she made building her team to 20 her ONE Thing. When her number of agents dips below 20, it becomes her priority again. Until her team is over 20 again, she’ll spend 20 to 30 hours a week focusing on adding to her sales force.

“When you have 20 agents and one agent leaves or two agents leave, everybody brushes it off,” Adelina says. “But if you have eight agents and one agent leaves or two agents leave, that’s like 25% of your sales force, and it’s really rough for you.”

In addition, you must talk to enough people to have enough appointments, she says. The process is simple and similar to getting listing appointments: set an appointment, build rapport and if the appointment is going somewhere, then do a needs analysis, and share the value proposition of PLACE and your local team.

Closing them doesn’t finalize the agent’s place on Adelina’s team. A new agent doesn’t work in the team’s office until graduating from PLACE Launch and completing all prerequisites. Through experience, Rotar learned that no exceptions can be made – they must enter the office already plugged in and prepared.

Jay White: Fish Where the Fish Are Owner/Operator, Charlotte, North Carolina

When Jay White (The Jay White Group) launched his team a year ago, he went straight into heavy recruiting as his GCI wasn’t steady, and it was mostly generated by himself.

“We knew we had to increase agent count to increase our GCI and make it consistent,” he shares.

He started recruiting new agents because it was an easy win: they needed a place to sell real estate, and he had the solution. He sponsored real estate school classes, then went and talked to the agents about joining his team.

“We were just fishing where the fish were,” he explains. “They were getting their real estate license in six weeks, and I wanted that.”

Since launching, Jay has built his team from four to 18 agents. He shares their stories and the team’s success on social media to attract others. “Brag about your team when you have something to brag about,” he suggests.

As a result, agents reach out to him regularly, asking how the team’s doing it.

With a growing team, Jay’s daily focus and activities have shifted. While his agents are lead-generating for buyers and sellers, he’s lead-generating for talent every day. In June, he only spent 10% of his time producing, whereas before that was more like 50 to 70%.

“I’ve got 400 leads in Brivity right now that are all recruiting leads. And I’m working that pipeline,” Jay says.

“If you look at operators who are recruiting the most agents to their team, every month, they talk to 60 new connections they’ve never talked to before. These top team builders meet with 18 of that group in person, then present an opportunity to eight. They’re actually hiring three out of the eight.”

— Chris Stuart, President, PLACE

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Through conversations with other PLACE Partners, Kimberlee Meserve (Street Property Team) has been able to leverage the expertise of others and learn from them. “I’m not reinventing the wheel,” she says.

Earlier this year, she spent a lot of time in conversations that didn’t develop into anything. “It took me a long time to figure out how to recruit,” Meserve admits. “My struggle was that I was too enthusiastic about the opportunity, almost to the point of not being clear enough on the expectations.”

She says she’s also “kind of copied what Jay is doing” by getting her admin involved to do the last interview to go over expectations and get her thumbs-up.

“We’ve done a lot of Indeed ads. I do something similar to what Adelina is doing if they’re not licensed; I funnel them to my career night,” she explains.

Her first career nights drew a group of 20 and her most recent career night welcomed more than 40. If an attendee is licensed, she schedules a phone screening with them.

Since February, all eight of her hires have been new agents. After two of them left, she pivoted to make it more clear in recruiting conversations that her team wasn’t for everybody. She can do this during her initial telephone conversation with the agent.

“We’re for the people that want to come in and build a really big business together, grow together, and we work super hard,” Meserve tells potential recruits.

“I think the number one thing that I’ve done wrong is I’ve really underestimated how much I need to recruit,” Jacqueline Smith (BKT Vancouver) cautions.

After joining PLACE, the Vancouver, Washington partner made recruiting her priority with a goal of building to 12 agents by the end of her first year.

She’s learned the hard way that she needs to double down on recruiting if she wants to do more than maintain her team. There are a lot of factors she doesn’t have control over, like a military spouse being transferred out of state or a new parent needing to spend more time with their child, she says.

Her ongoing recruitment strategy is to send out value. She reaches out to agents in her recruiting database every Monday, experimenting with the content to get a response and engagement. Tuesday through Thursday, she’s contacting potential recruits to set up coffee and lunch conversations.

She switched her focus from recruiting new agents to targeting those in the business for 12 to 18 months, “who have done a few transactions but still are not really fully getting off the ground,” she says.

Since then, she’s built her team to 21 agents with a goal of 30 by the end of this year, she says. She has developed a strategy to avoid making cold calls to experienced agents. “I’m inviting agents to do the things that I’m doing and see who is engaging, then I’m connecting with those people,” she says.