Top 5 Tips to Maximize Data-Driven Recruiting for Your Brokerage

There's a lot of luck involved in recruitment in the real estate industry (and indeed, in every other industry). Whether you like it or not, even after a long and thorough process, a perfect candidate may still end up being a bad hire.

Thankfully, through the help of technology, data-driven recruiting has helped revolutionize the industry. There may still be a bit of luck involved but overall, data has helped make real estate recruitment a more exact practice.

However, not everybody knows how to maximize data-driven recruiting. If you need a bit of help so that you can make the most of your data and find the best real estate agents for your brokerage, here are some tips: 

Use the Right Tools

The first thing you have to have for data-driven recruiting is, of course, data. Thus, the first order of business is to ensure that you have access to the information you need. 

Fortunately, there are a variety of tools that you can use for this purpose. Get Brokerkit for something straightforward and easy to use. It's a real estate recruiting software that can integrate with Broker Metrics, giving you access to a wealth of data from MLS. It also makes it easy for you to process your numbers.

What you need to remember is that the more tools you have, the less coherent your information will tend to be. This makes integration-capable software like Brokerkit more valuable to real estate recruiters. With only a few but hard-working tools, you can collect and process data more efficiently.

Use the Right Data

When it comes to data, more is not always better. There's a lot of recruitment data that you can pull from multiple sources but not all of them will be relevant to your brokerage's goals. To ensure that you're getting the right information, sit down with your recruiting team and discuss what you want to achieve. This will help you prioritize KPIs and thus gather the right data.

That said, here are some of the most common—and often most important—recruitment metrics you need to look at:

• Time to hire
• Time to per stage
• Acceptance rate
• Application submission rate
• Source of hire
• Candidates per hire
• Retention rate
• Applications per ad, per channel
• Cost per hire
• Cost per ad

Depending on the recruitment issues you're facing, some of the above-mentioned metrics may be more crucial than others.

Analyze the Data to Identify Issues and Respond Accordingly

What's great about data is that it can tell you a lot of things. 

However, data won't directly reveal what you need to know. 

You need to process it first, then analyze the results in order to derive insights. You then need to correlate these insights in order to pinpoint issues. For example, you may be taking too long to hire real estate agents because you don't have enough applications on the right platforms.

Once you've identified the roadblocks in your recruitment process, you can formulate appropriate strategies to respond. If necessary, involve other teams in addressing issues. The website team, for instance, can help you create a more streamlined careers page and an easy-to-fill application form.

Plan for the Future

​One of the biggest benefits of data-driven recruiting is that it improves forecasting. Based on historical trends of your recruitment data, you can avoid risks and prepare for worst-case scenarios. 

More importantly, you can implement changes that will positively affect your brokerage's hiring process in the future.

Data also allows you to become more adaptable. 

As information comes in, you can interpret the numbers and make adjustments to your strategies as soon as possible. Of course, you should also take into account the other insights you've derived from your data before you make decisions.

Understand that Data Is Not Infallible

Data is not infallible.This is why, even if there are existing tools that allow you to automate data processing, you still need to conduct further analysis. It's the nuance of human interpretation that makes data-driven recruitment so much more effective.

If you let software and algorithms take care of everything for you, you may end up missing out on talented real estate agents. An example scenario: the AI may reject an applicant who has a long work gap, even if the reason behind it is perfectly reasonable like an illness or other life obligations.

Technological tools are useful, but what makes them truly great is when we humans are able to use them wisely and to their fullest potential. Keep in mind that, at its core, recruitment is people-centric. Thus, you can't let machines do everything for you.

Data-driven recruiting may take a bit of getting used to, especially if you and your brokerage have been used to the traditional methods. These tips can help you get better at using data and ultimately improve your real estate agent recruitment output and overall performance. 

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