We’ve recently had the pleasure of presenting at the Realty Alliance Conference in New York City, during which time we touched base with many of our clients, in addition to meeting roughly forty other leaders in the real estate industry, whom we previously only knew by name.
Preparing for the presentation provided me with a good excuse to spend some time boiling down some of what we’ve learned over the past five years regarding recruiting. I initially came up with a very long and rather cumbersome and detailed list of rules, but soon whittled it down to a concise and potent list of Three Rules.
Before sharing these rules with you, allow me to briefly review some important principles around science and research design that has given us the ability to deduce these rules.
When one sets out to improve results of any kind, one must do more than analyze just the results. However, many business people do just this, especially where preconceived beliefs and biases have been in place for many years. Excuse the exaggeration, but what many people end up doing, is simply looking at the results exclusively, and demanding, “Give me better results today than I had yesterday,” or simply, "We need to get better results!"
What happens under these conditions is that a very wide variety of systems and methods become adopted by those who have been charged with the task of “delivering results.” These haphazard systems contain such personal and idiosyncratic twists that the methods are impossible to replicate across all territories or offices. When this occurs, the organization loses any ability to replicate any success, and instead becomes dependent on a few superstars who are the only ones who can pull off their own personal method of recruiting (or any other task for that matter).
The scientific method is a much different process than the above. The scientific method regarding any sort of improvement sets out to:
- Determine all variables that might have a significant impact on the result.
- Manipulate those variables until the results are significantly improved.
And then most importantly…
- Assess if these same variables can be similarly manipulated and the results replicated in other environments (across offices, corporate cultures, territories, country, etc.).
In essence, this is what we, at Tidemark, set out to do five years ago - And we want to thank many of our clients who have allowed us to experiment in their backyard. Many of you are likely aware of several of our methods derived from the above process. (If you aren’t, please contact me.)
I'll give you a couple of days to chew on the above information. See if you can guess what we've figured out to be the Three Simple Rules to Scalable Recruiting. I'll include them later this week. Stay tuned...
Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.
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