For any business to succeed, it is crucial to hire top performers. For real estate brokerages in particular, recruiting the best real estate agents is of utmost importance. Without a core team of talented agents, it will be extra challenging to close deals and retain clients. This means that you have to step up your recruiting strategies to produce the best results.

With this in mind, one of the most important elements of your recruiting strategies is the candidate experience. Essentially, this is a job seeker’s impression of your brokerage. Even without being hired, a candidate can accurately assess your company just by their experience during the recruitment process. Are you going to be a good employer? Will the work environment be pleasant and conducive to growth? If they arrive at a less-than-stellar conclusion, then they will likely not want to proceed with their application.

Thus, it will benefit your organization to invest time and resources in improving the candidate experience. Aside from getting off to a good start with your potential future employees, you’ll also likely attract more top talents. Also, keep in mind that people can and will talk about their bad experiences. This can affect your reputation as a brand and as an employer, making it more challenging for you to hire good people in the future.

With all that being said, here are some tips for creating a great candidate experience to improve your brokerage’s recruiting strategies:

Use Recruiting Software

One of the best things about working in the 21st century is that there’s a technological solution for almost anything. In recruitment, a great tool for improving the candidate experience is recruiting software. An example is Brokerkit real estate recruiting, which comes with a variety of features like lead generation and segmentation, email campaign automation, as well as various integration capabilities. Simply put, recruiting software helps you streamline many of the repetitive elements of recruitment so that you can be faster and more efficient.

Avoid Hiring for the Sake of Hiring

While it’s true that hiring the right people is crucial to business success, you shouldn’t get in the habit of hiring someone “just because.” To make the candidate experience more meaningful, you should be hiring with a purpose. You might be tempted to snap up a high-performing agent before your competitor; however, if you aren’t clear about what their role would be and what you need from them, the entire recruitment process may end up being awkward or downright unpleasant.

As such, before you announce to job seekers that you have an opening, make sure that you’re hiring for the right reasons. You can start by conducting a skills gap analysis, so you know exactly what kind of employee you need. Then, be as detailed as possible when writing the job description and requirements. This will help you attract the most suitable job candidates.

Simplify the Application Process

Nothing can be more frustrating than being invited to submit a job application and then finding out that you have to jump through hoops to do it. Don’t be that company that makes candidates click through a bunch of links just to be able to fill out an inquiry form. Instead, keep your website’s careers page easy to find and your forms short.

It’s also best not to ask candidates to create an account in your system before letting them apply. This is unnecessarily tedious; while it’s a great way to collect candidate information, there are other ways you can go about it. Lastly, make sure to let applicants know what they need to submit from the very beginning. That said, try to limit your documentary requirements. No one likes to be asked for a mountain of paperwork, only to be rejected later.

Manage Expectations Early On

To minimize feelings of unease or even anxiety for job candidates, it’s best to manage their expectations early on. If you can, include an outline of the hiring process at the end of the job description. This way, a candidate knows what will come next after they submit their application. You don’t have to provide exact details, either; just an overview of the steps will suffice.

Looking for a job can be a nerve-wracking endeavor. By making things a little less stress-inducing, you can make the candidate experience so much better for your applicants.

Keep in Touch Throughout the Process

Another thing you can do to create a positive candidate experience is to keep in touch at every stage of the hiring process. Let people know where they are in the recruitment process and what comes next. It’s also crucial to let candidates who didn’t make the cut know the results of their application, and then thank them for applying. You can extend an invitation to include them in your company’s pool of passive candidates, so they don’t feel completely rejected.

Pay Attention to Onboarding

Last but not least, keep in mind that the recruitment process doesn’t end with a signed job offer; there’s still the onboarding to think about! This is your opportunity to make the successful candidate truly welcome in your organization, so make sure that you have a program in place. Prepare a “starter pack” that contains essentials (e.g., the employee handbook and similar documents) and perhaps a small gift like a personalized pen.

The key is to ensure that you’re happy to have new hires onboard and that they’ll have all the support they need to succeed in their new position.

Hopefully, with the help of these tips, you can create a more satisfying candidate experience for your future job applicants. Good luck!

Further Reading

How to build a winning internship program
5 Top Job Description Tools
Recruiting university graduates directly – is it a good idea?