WorkPuzzle

To Be or Not to Be - Audited

It's not that I have anything to hide, but the prospect of an audit just doesn’t sound very pleasant. Although I have some friends who tell me that their audits were pain free, I nevertheless hope to avoid the experience.

My curiosity led me to Google a search about the odds of an audit. Here is what I found in a Washington Post article written by Christopher Ingraham.

“The Associated Press reported Monday that your chances of getting audited are the lowest in years. ‘This year, the IRS will have fewer agents auditing returns than at any time since at least the 1980s,’ the report says. Noting that less than one percent of individual returns were audited last year, the story quotes IRS Commissioner John Koskinen as saying that the audit rate will be even lower this year.”

If you want some historic perspective, the IRS doesn't make it easy. It has reported on annual audit rates for decades, but these figures are buried deep within PDFs of its annual reports. I dug up the audit rates going back to 1980, which I charted below.

 

Last year did indeed mark the first time audit rates dipped below one percent since 2006. But the rate was even lower in previous years, bottoming out at 0.49 percent in 2000. Audit rates were highest over this time period in the early 1980s, when more than 2 percent of individual returns were examined by auditors.

Audit rates differ by income. The IRS doesn't provide consistent income breakdowns of the audit data over time, but in 2013 your chance of getting audited was 0.88 percent if your income was under $200,000, 3.26 percent for incomes greater than $200,000, and 10.85 percent for earners making over $1 million per year.

In sum, you're about half as likely to get audited today as you were in 1980, but twice as likely as you were in 2000. If you get audited this year, congratulations! You are the one percent - at least when it comes to tax filers.”

This was an informative article and I hope it relieves some anxiety... except, of course, for those of you who make more than 1 million a year. 

Have a Happy Easter or Joyous Passover or a Great Weekend!

 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

New to the Endangered List: Reading

I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that my ability to read for long stretches of time has shortened. I’m now reading four books at once, partly because they are easily accessible on my Kindle and partly because I can't seem to focus on one for any length of time without getting distracted and moving onto the next one.

In fact, when I read at bedtime I find myself falling asleep after reading just a couple of pages. And, until I read the recent article in the Washington Post I believed that it was all due to being busy and perhaps older.

There is apparently another cause for all of the above symptoms.

Neuroscience researchers are discovering something pretty alarming.

“Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.

“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of 'Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.'

If the rise of nonstop cable TV news gave the world a culture of sound bites, the Internet, Wolf said, is bringing about an eye byte culture.”

Here is an excerpt that describes where we’ve been and where we are now:

“Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. Sure, there might be pictures mixed in with the text, but there didn’t tend to be many distractions. Reading in print even gave us a remarkable ability to remember where key information was in a book simply by the layout, researchers said...

The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.

“We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scroll­ing and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,” said Andrew Dillon, a University of Texas professor who studies reading. “We’re in this new era of information behavior, and we’re beginning to see the consequences of that.”

What will the consequences be? What about this next generation? Apparently reading wasn’t something our brains were designed to do originally, and because of this it may not take much time to unwire the reading ability:

“The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read.”

I doubt and sincerely hope that reading does not become a de-evolving experience of human behavior.

I, personally, am going to reduce my internet scanning and I will do my best to read to my grandson every chance I get. 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Key to Organizational Success Part 2: Teaching Agents to Get Over Small Offenses

Earlier this week, I highlighted research that Gallup recently published on the characteristics of high-performing managers.  Here is the list of common traits that great managers share:

They motivate every single employee (agent) to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.

They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.

They create a culture of clear accountability.

They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.

They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.

As I think about leading my own team of employees, these traits set a high bar.  I personally need to make improvements in all five areas.

There is one trait on this list, however, that I think is particularly difficult to implement (#4): Building relationships that create trust, open dialog, and full transparency.

Why is this one so difficult?  Because it’s the only trait that requires the full bilateral engagement of those I manage.  I can’t create trust unless the other person chooses to trust me.  I can’t have an open dialog unless the other person agrees to talk.  We can’t have a fully transparent relationship unless both sides agree to reveal themselves.

Improving on #4 is certainly a complex topic, but I wanted share a strategy I’ve personally been trying to use to improve the trust and openness with those I manage.

The technique was brought to my attention by an article I read a few months ago written by Esther Inglis-Arkell on a blog called IO9.  Here is an excerpt from Arkell’s article:

We seem to have a kind of pettiness built into our nature. We will watch soppy movies about the redemption of murderers, or a long television series about gleeful serial killers, but have a character in a movie litter and we want them in prison.

Our real lives are not exempt from this. We can nurse a grudge against someone who gave us a dirty look for years. When someone we love screams at us, we forgive them in a few days.

A team of scientists from UCLA, Harvard, and the University of Virginia conducted a series of experiments that showed the people are bad at predicting how hurt will affect them over time.

We tend to assume the more painful injuries, the major ones, or the ones committed by loved ones, will cause the most pain over time… [But the opposite is true]. If the hurt is minor, we [tend to] let it fester...

Why do we furiously resent the minor insults but forgive, or at least let go, of the major ones? Why do we let those close to us insult us in ways we'd never take from a stranger? According to the study authors, it's because we can afford to….

If holding a grudge means we have to be angry and miserable for a long time, we find a way to stop being angry. If we just suffer a little annoyance, we allow it. Or sometimes we even enjoy it.

So, here is my new strategy to create trust, open dialog, and full transparency with those I manage: 

I am making a point to overlook and forgive the small offenses that commonly take place in the work environment.

In addition, I am going to encourage others to do the same (both with me and with each other).  

My goal is to make this way of relating an integral part of our company’s culture:  We don’t hold grudges, we overlook the small stuff, and we forgive those around us who commit small offenses—even if they don’t ask for forgiveness.

Is this something you could also implement on your team?  Like me, you’d have to start with your own behavior and then let it grow into becoming part of your culture.

According to the research, this change will improve your chances of building trust-filled relationships among those on your team.  Combined with the other traits, you’ll then be one step closer to becoming a great manager.

Note:   If you like all the social science/organizational psychology stuff, you may want to read all of Arkell’s article, or download the original research paper.  Both are helpful in understanding why forgiveness in helpful in building trust.

 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Key to Organizational Success: The Right Manager

Are you a great manager? If so, you’re amongst a small minority of individuals who work for companies in the United States.  If you are not a great manager (yet), keep reading.  There is a recipe of talents that great managers possess and it is not as complicated or illusive as you might imagine.

The research on this topic (done by the Gallup Organization) was recently reported in the Harvard Business Review (HBR).  It outlines both the importance of good managers and the scarcity of their existence in business world.

Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply whom they name manager. Yet our analysis suggests that they usually get it wrong. In fact, Gallup finds that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time. 

Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units, Gallup estimates. This variation is in turn responsible for severely low worldwide employee engagement.

Gallup reported in two large-scale studies in 2012 that only 30% of U.S. employees are engaged at work, and a staggeringly low 13% worldwide are engaged. Worse, over the past 12 years these low numbers have barely budged, meaning that the vast majority of employees worldwide are failing to develop and contribute at work.

So, high-performing managers cause employees to increase their engagement in their day-to-day work. That begs the question: Why is employee engagement so important?   HBR goes on to explain:

Gallup has discovered links between employee engagement at the business-unit level and vital performance indicators [such as] customer metrics, higher profitability, productivity, quality (fewer defects), and lower turnover…. When a company raises employee engagement levels consistently across every business unit, everything gets better.

A negative chain reaction seems to be at play in most companies.  Employees (agents) who are disengaged cause companies to perform poorly, and employee (agent) disengagement is primarily caused by low-performing managers.

The purpose of this WorkPuzzle is not to beat up on managers.  Even if they wanted to do so, most real estate companies would have a hard time replacing their existing managers with higher-performing alternatives.

In most cases, it would be a better strategy to help the managers who are already on the job make improvements.  More specifically, these developments should be focused on the task of improving employee engagement.

Gallup outlines five critical talents that good managers possess as it relates to increasing employee engagement:

They motivate every single employee (agent) to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.

They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.

They create a culture of clear accountability.

They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.

They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.

If you’re a manager, review this list and take inventory of your day-to-day actions.  Are these the behaviors you find yourself doing?  If not, how can you start to focus your attention on these important tasks.  Remember, these are the tasks and traits of managers who manage highly engaged agents.

If you’re managing managers (owner, general manager, regional VP, etc.), set the example by making these traits part of your management culture.  Then coach your managers to take on these traits as they manage their own teams.

As a result, you’ll hopefully have more engaged agents who will produce the business metrics that make your company more successful.  That’s a purpose everyone can get behind.

 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Execution Failure and Rescue: Lessons from Healthcare.gov - Part 2

In last weeks edition I described some of the challenges, chronicled in a recent Time Magazine article, on the healthcare.gov website's initial issues. It’s a compelling story, that when dissected, leaves us all with reminders of the differences between how projects can go wrong and what can be done to right them.

I previously listed three ingredients (principles) that when missing in any worthy endeavor will lead to failure; but conversely, when done well can lead to a successful execution. I also promised to draw parallels to HiringCenter successes.

Last weeks edition described the first and most important principle:

Metric Driven Leadership to Oversee and Drive the Effort 

The second ingredient is:

A Central Dashboard to Monitor, Measure and Improve each Important Metric.

Quoting again from the Time magazine article:

“One of the things that shocked Burt and Park's team most (the healthcare.com rescue team)--'among many jaw-dropping aspects of what we found,' as one put it--'was that the people running healthcare.gov had no "dashboard," no quick way for engineers to measure what was going on at the website, such as how many people were using it, what the response times were for various click-throughs and where traffic was getting tied up.' So late into the night of Oct. 18, Burt and the others spent about five hours coding and putting up a dashboard.”

Can you imagine this? You have developed one of the largest scaled projects known to developed countries, a system that will draw incredible scrutiny, and you have no way to monitor, measure or improve anything.  No idea what is wrong or how to fix it.

One of the first things we did, at Tidemark, as we were developing HiringCenter, was to create a dashboard. This allowed our clients (and us) to constantly monitor progress among the many tasks that must be performed with each candidate within the massive pipeline.

Those of our clients who practice ingredient one (metric driven leadership to oversee and drive the effort), seem to naturally utilize principle two exemplified by the HiringCenter Dashboard. Conversely those who don’t have ingredient one typically abandon the Dashboard. You can probably guess what results appear when these essential pieces are lacking. Sooner or later someone says... “this isn’t working."  

Which brings us to the third ingredient:

 A Sense of Urgency

 According to TIME, one of the technology consultants (Abbott) who had worked on the rescue site said:

“To this day he cannot figure out who was supposed to have been in charge of the healthcare.gov launch. Instead he saw multiple contractors bickering with one another and no one taking ownership for anything. Someone would have to be put in charge, he told Zients. Beyond that, Abbott recalls, "there was a total lack of urgency" despite the fact that the website was becoming a national joke and crippling the Obama presidency."

TIME then goes on to describe the rescue teams mentality:

"We need to stay focused on the most urgent issues, The stand-up culture--identify problem, solve problem, try again--was typical of the rescue squad's ethic."

What was the eventual result of the rescue squads overhaul of the website?

“On Sunday, Dec. 1, Zients issued a public report card showing the website's turnaround. A series of hardware upgrades had dramatically increased capacity; the system was now able to handle at least 50,000 simultaneous users and probably more. There had been more than 400 bug fixes. Uptimes had gone from an abysmal 43% at the beginning of November to 95%. And Kim and her team had knocked the error rate from 6% down to 0.5%. Average response time--once a ridiculous eight seconds per page--was down to 0.343 seconds.”

Impressive isn’t it?

Assessing the issues, solutions and steps involved in this example, we at Tidemark have considered requiring new to HiringCenter clients to agree to use only the  "best practices" established by us over the last 9 years and screen out those who don’t agree. So far we haven’t done this. What do you think? Would this be helpful?

For those of you who practice the principals listed above throughout every facet of HiringCenter we thank you. You make us look good, and it is our hope that we improve the efficiency, predictability and reliability of your new agent recruiting.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Execution Failure and Rescue: Lessons from HealthCare.gov

The key ingredients to HiringCenter success are no different than those responsible for rescuing the HealthCare.gov website; ingredients the recent administration had sorely lacked and had to discover the hard way.

Time magazine sets up the scene:

“Last Oct. 17—more than two weeks after the launch of HealthCare.gov—White House press secretary Jay Carney was going through what one senior Obama aide calls 'probably the most painful press briefing we’ve ever seen.' Pressed repeatedly on when the site would be fixed, the best he could say was that 'they are making improvements every day.'

“They” were, in fact, not making improvements, except by chance, much as you or I might reboot or otherwise play with our computer; a shot in the dark fix. Yet barely six weeks later, HealthCare.gov was working well and on its way to performing even better.

This is the story of a team of unknown—except in elite technology circles—coders and troubleshooters who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save the website. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspects (Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn’t work) this ad hoc team rescued it and, arguably, Obama's chance at a health-reform legacy.”

The remainder of this article describes the drama associated with this technology crisis and boiled down the ultimate rescue to principles essential to execution success; principles that coincidentally guide every one of our clients in their HiringCenter results.

Principle I:  Metric driven leadership to oversee and drive the effort   

"In the meetings prior to the launch, President Obama always would end each session by saying, 'I want to remind the team that this only works if the technology works.' The problem, of course, was that no one in the meetings had any idea whether the technology worked, nor did the President and his chief of staff have the inclination to dig in and find out. The President may have had the right instinct when he repeatedly reminded his team about the technology. But in the end he was as aloof from the people and facts he needed to avoid this catastrophe as he was from the people who ended up fixing it.”

The Blaze website summarizes the Time article this way:

 “When it became clear that the website had major flaws and needed working, the Obama administration rushed to assemble a team to fix it. This involved bringing in some of the brightest tech minds from the private sector.

However, as the team slowly came together, they found that the website’s problems were bigger than they initially imagined.

Mike Abbott , for example, is known in the tech industry for being the man who developed Twitter’s technology into what it is today. He was shocked by what he found when he was brought on to rescue healthcare.gov.

'Abbott could not find … leadership. He says that to this day he cannot figure out who was supposed to have been in charge of the Healthare.gov launch,' Time reported. 'Instead he saw multiple contractors bickering with one another and no one taking ownership for anything. Someone would have to be put in charge, he told Zients.'"

According to additional comments from "Time": “Jeff Zients isn't a techie himself. He's a business executive, one of those people for whom control--achieved by lists, schedules, deadlines and incessant focus on his targeted data points--seems to be everything.

This story thus far resonates with everything we at Tidemark have come to understand about HiringCenter results: Our best performing clients ensure that those responsible for the oversite of each piece of the HiringCenter process is someone with a proven history of measurement and execution. Everyone involved knows who is in charge, and who oversees each metric in the process. Do you?

In the next edition I will share more of this interesting story and the final two principles that drive success. 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Sales Meeting Prep: 9 Lessons from Shark Tank

Since the focus audience of WorkPuzzle is real estate industry leaders, owners, and managers, readers often tell me that they’ve used our blog content as discussion topics for their sales meetings.  Many of the topics we cover can be adapted to help agents perform at a higher level. 

If you haven’t thought of doing this yet, try searching a topic on WorkPuzzle.com (right side of the
website, next to the search button).  There are more than 600 articles we’ve written over the last few years.

To get some ideas flowing, I’ve found an article that could be very helpful in teaching your agents to think like entrepreneurs.  It was originally written by Brett and Kate McKay and published on their popular blog.

The article highlights some lessons the authors gleaned from the popular television series Shark Tank.   If you’re not familiar with Shark Tank, it is a show where aspiring entrepreneurs get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pitch their business ideas to a panel of “sharks” — five self-made millionaires and billionaires and ask for funding in exchange for equity in their businesses.

Here are some excerpts from the top three lessons that I believe apply to real estate agents:

Learn how to pitch. If there’s one lesson you take from Shark Tank and this post, let it be this: master the art of the pitch.

Even if you don’t think you’ll ever find yourself standing in front of a bunch of venture capitalists, every entrepreneur needs to know how to effectively sell himself and his idea to his potential partners, employees, and clients/customers.

You’d think on a show like Shark Tank — in which people know they’ll be asking for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on national television – the entrepreneurs would prepare for their pitch like crazy.

But you’d be wrong.

I’d venture that 50% of the pitches on Shark Tank are absolutely horrible, 40% are so-so, and 10% are stellar. Some of the folks on Shark Tank just seem like they’re winging it, which makes for some awkward, yet entertaining moments.

If only 10% of Shark Tank participants are able to make good pitches, do you think some of your agents may be doing sub-par pitches to their clients?   I think you could bet on that. 

I’ve heard from several sources that the best pitch ever done on Shark Tank was by an 18-year-old girl who owns a skincare company called Simple Sugars.  It might be worth buying this episode and using it as a case study. (Season 4, Episode 19)

Know your business.   Mark Cuban once said, “Know your business and industry better than anyone else in the world.”

You need to know your numbers — sales, cash flow, debt, margin, and so on. The sharks often hesitate to make a deal with entrepreneurs who don’t know important data points like their customer acquisition cost.

But knowing your business extends far beyond having a handle on your numbers; it requires a deep understanding and grasp of the industry you’re competing in. Lots of entrepreneurs come on the show pitching a product or service they think is truly unique, only to be informed by one of the sharks that a very similar product or service already exists. If they had done just a bit of due diligence, they could have avoided that embarrassing “surprise.”

A perfect example of entrepreneurs who came on "Shark Tank" without really understanding their industry (or even business) was a pair of doctors pitching a social network for their fellow MDs called Rolodoc. The docs had no clue how social media worked, or even what it was, despite the fact that their business idea would supposedly revolve round it. Consequently, they stumbled over even very basic questions about how their idea would be executed and how it would actually make money. Mark Cuban called it the worst pitch in "Shark Tank" history.

Do your agents really know their businesses?    This is a great way to breach this topic without coming across as overly critical.  You can buy this episode also (Season 5, Episode 1).

Concentrate on your core competency. Sometimes an already successful business will enter the tank seeking more capital to expand and grow.  Nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when one of these companies wants to use that money to expand into a somewhat related product line or service that detracts from their original core competency.

Most of the sharks are leery of these businesses and will often tell the entrepreneur that they’ll only invest if they drop their plans for the expanded product line. Why would they want their money funneled into an untested product or service instead of being used to boost a proven winner?

It’s good to experiment and try different things in business, but never lose sight of your core competency. Getting sidetracked has been the downfall of many a business. This is especially true with the volume and ease with which you can get feedback on social media these days; you might hear from a bunch of folks who say, “I wish you guys would make this too!” leading you to believe there’s a popular demand for a new expansion in your business. Then it turns out that those commenters actually represented a very small but disproportionately vocal minority.

Know what you’re good at and stick close to it.

These are good lessons for any businessperson. They are especially helpful for real estate professionals because the best agents are entrepreneurs at heart.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Shrimp Fishing and Recruiting - Really?

If you are a Tidemark client and user of HiringCenter, you've experienced the occasional interview that can't end fast enough. The candidate who is scheduled for an hour of your valuable time and then turns out to be a dud. 

During a recent checkup meeting with some of our newer clients at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Georgia, a manager shared a disturbing (but funny) story about one of her first candidate interviews.

The candidate showed up "high on something," sweating profusely, bragging that she was "in the sexual prime" of her life, and asked if she could have "some of your candies," only to sweep the entire platter into her large purse. At this point in the interview the dazed manager began looking around her office attempting to locate the hidden cameras, certain that Alan Funt would spring out at anytime.  

After hearing this brief narrative, I think many of us considered such an interview to be a waste of time and had some real doubts about the success of recruiting in general.

However, CEO Dan Foresman stood up and said, "Recruiting is like shrimp fishing." Over the next several minutes he had us all captivated by his incredible expertise when it comes to shrimp fishing, and also its relationship to this type of "early in the pipeline" recruiting. 

My recollection of Dan's tale was as follows. Dan was once a captain of a shrimp boat. In the winter shrimp fishing is basically throwing down the nets and hauling them in predominantly with shrimp. This is because shrimp don't mind cold water, whereas catfish and crab don't like it. Bringing up only shrimp in your nets is a great feeling and is similar to experienced agent and new licensee recruiting:  you know what you have in the net. 

When using services such as HiringCenter for recruiting you don't know exactly what you're going to get. This is more like summer shrimp fishing. As Dan explains it: "When that net comes up... It's not full of just great shrimp. Oh no! It comes up with mostly everything else you can imagine.  You sort through catfish, crab, trash and everything else you can imagine. In fact, the crab bite your ankles, the catfish sting your hand, the trash smells, but it must be done to get to the shrimp." 

Although that sounds like a lot of unpleasant work at times, the shrimp fisherman chooses to fish for both the winter and summer season. The fisherman realizes that he has made an investment in his boat, nets, crew, etc. so the more shrimp the more success.

The analogy is painfully clear. Nothing worth acquiring is obtained without a screening or selection process. Whether its gold, silver, diamonds, shrimp or agents, you have to be able to sort through the whole to find what you really want. 

Back to recruiting: Dan and most of our clients tell us that even when they are "winter" recruiting for experienced agents, the conversion rate is 20% or 1 in 5. With new-to-Real Estate- HiringCenter recruiting our clients average 20-25% on conversion from interview to hire. So what actually might feel like summer shrimp fishing, where there might be a few crab and catfish, in the end the odds of landing shrimp who stay on your boat is really no different. 

The bottom line is someone has invested in the boat, the license to fish, the nets, the fuel and the sonar equipment. With HiringCenter, the captains have even invested in deck hands further up stream to sort through much of the debris before you even see the net.

This sorting is done by Tidemark and your own Recruiting Coordinator.  What they want you, as a manager, to understand is that sorting through a few "catfish and crab" is time consuming but ultimately successful.

To increase the hires in every season is a reasonable outcome for their investment. Do you have 2 or 3 hours a month to do that sorting? 

We realize that some managers in certain seasons will get more catfish than shrimp, but as long as the net gain of excellent candidates are coming in the door somewhere, it should give us all hope for our own "big catch." 

By the end of our time with BHHS Georgia, and Dan's great analogy, every one of their excellent group of managers understood this message. They also understood that after all, "summer shrimp fishing" is what they ask their agents to do every day of the year.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Why Hiring Candidates Who “Hit the Ground Running” Will Eventually Kill Your Company

Dave and I had the privilege of spending time at two major real estate industry conferences over the last month.  I love this time of year because we get to interact with many real estate industry leaders, owners, and managers.

We learn a bunch by spending face-to-face time with our clients and other thought leaders during these times.  The most insightful information almost always comes in the one-on-one conversations.  So, we seek out opportunities to engage in as many of these discussions as possible.

In future WorkPuzzles, Dave and I will both share some of the things we learned at these conferences.  Today, however, I wanted shed some light on a myth that is alive and well in the real estate industry.

Over the last month, I’ve heard at least a dozen managers tell me that their primary objective in hiring is to engage candidates who can “hit the ground running” and make a quick contribution to their offices.

This typically means hiring an experienced agent who is working for a competitor or a new person that is already licensed or near the end of their licensing process.

If all other things were equal, of course it would make sense to use this criteria.  But what happens when this criteria takes priority over other criteria?

I’m going to let one of the most successful hiring companies in the world answer that question.  It’s not a real estate company, but they are in an industry where speed, competence, and successful hiring are just as critical to their business model as it is to yours.

The company is LinkedIn, and the details of their hiring practices were recently published by Max Nison on the Quartz financial news aggregator.  Here is an excerpt from Nison’s article:

“The thing that you start to hear as you get bigger, when someone talks about a candidate they want to hire, they often start talking about how they’re excited because this person will hit the ground running,” LinkedIn’s Dan Shapero tells Quartz. “And hitting the ground running is a very short-term benefit.”

Shapero’s organization has certainly gotten bigger. He heads LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions group, which provides tools for recruiters and is by far the most profitable of its three major divisions. It produced $245.6 million in revenue last quarter, 55% of the company’s total. In Q2 of 2011, the first time LinkedIn reported earnings after its IPO, the division made $58.6 million.

The better way to hire, Shapero says, is to think about long-term potential and cultural fit.

“I’m trying to change the language on a team so they’re not talking about hitting the ground running, but about long-term potential,” Shapero says. “Who, over the course of two or three years, is going to have the biggest possible impact on the organization? That pivot has changed the way we think about new hires.”

Some of his most successful people, he says, don’t have a background typical of the job they have. They take a bit longer to get going, but it’s worth it.

“There was something in them, a fit with who we want to aspire to be as a company, a real aptitude, and a real motivation that we saw something in and were willing to take a bet and wait a little longer to see play out,” Shapero says.

Let’s imagine you’re wandering around the halls of LinkedIn and you’re listening in on what your counterparts (hiring managers) are talking about in their team meetings.    You’d be hearing many of the same topics you discuss in your team meetings—how to hire people who can make a contribution quickly.

Many real estate hiring managers think this issue is unique to the real estate industry. Nonsense!  This problem exists everywhere humans run companies.  Every hiring manager has to fight the urge to grab the short-term benefit at the expense of long-term progress.

There is more to this story that I’ll cover in a future blog.  For today, I encourage you to follow the lead of the most profitable division at LinkedIn—focus on hiring people who have the highest long-term potential for your organization. 

Know that this strategy will take more work, patience, and discipline than other methodologies because high-potential candidates are rarely at a place where they can “hit the ground running” when you first meet them. 

Remember what you learned in kindergarten—the tortoise does eventually defeat the hare.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Recruiting the Next Generation

Ben has written extensively on the topic of the aging Real Estate Agent demographic and its threat to derail the future of the traditional Real Estate model.

We have heard similar conversations about this topic repeated among many of our clients and it was a "hot topic" at recent conferences.

So is there any validity in the theory? I did some poking around to find hard data to verify or discount this trend. 

In a recent survey by Imprev (A Real Estate marketing firm) it turns out that finding younger talent is on the minds of most thought leaders in the industry. 

"Although recruiting is a perennial issue, leaders of the nation's major brokerages who were surveyed about the issues that concern them most put an even finer point on it, citing "recruiting younger agents" as their top business challenge; it was selected by 70 percent of respondents. "Recruiting top talent" is the second-most crucial business challenge, specified by 65 percent.

"The real estate business is aging out," said Renwick Congdon, chief executive officer of Imprev, the real estate marketing software firm that works with 150,000 agents and brokers nationwide. "Broker-owners and other top real estate executives are under pressure to find new talent."

And another supporting piece -

National Association of Realtors data show that a mere 6 percent of its membership is under the age of 34 -- and that in the past 15 years, the percentage of members in their 40s has dropped by one-third. Additionally, more than 40 percent of all Realtors are older than 60 and one in four is 65 or older.

Based on the factors discussed in the above paragraph it should come as no surprise to learn the following:

Recruiting is a pervasive topic: When asked the open-ended question, "What is your firm's single biggest challenge today?" nearly 40 percent of the written answers cite recruiting. Profitability garners the second spot, cited by 14 percent of the executives, with 13 percent mentioning technology.

The good news is that the majority of you who read this blog already address this vital challenge and as a result are hopefully ahead of your competitor.

And in finding solutions to this challenge, you are providing the next generation and your consumers (both current and future) an incredible gift.

• Offering the younger talent, an alternative to being underemployed in a possible job with no future.
• For the consumer - More diversity, which can potentially lead to a better match in the style and knowledge of the agent they choose.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.