Recruiting the best new agents demands an understanding of how the best recruits think and reach decisions. It also requires an understanding of the natural conflict that occurs inside the minds of people further down the ladder of the recruiting pipeline...the people who are just beginning to ponder the possibility of becoming an agent.
Many managers have told me, point blank, that they don't have time to waste on someone who has trouble deciding if real estate is right for them. One manager has been known to say, "If I have to interview a person for more than 20 minutes, then the candidate isn't right for real estate." Here's another one I hear a lot: "If they don't have a license, then I'm not interested."
The managers who say this are very confident in their views. And for the first few years that I worked in this industry, I naturally had to respect their views because I hadn't seen enough to gauge the accuracy, or fallacy, of what they were so convinced of.
But now I have. And I have ample evidence to suggest that their strong-headed, somewhat bullheaded way of interviewing new agent candidates rarely uncovers the best candidates, rather it attracts the most desperate and insecure candidates who fake cooperation and decisiveness just to get the approval of the inpatient narcissistic manager. Now, I don't really expect these types of managers to change.
However, most managers I've met really want to know how to interview well, and are hungry to understand what is going on inside the minds of high caliber people. That is...most managers fit somewhere between the ones who naturally and somehow intuitively act to facilitate the decision process, and those who treat candidates like peons. (Side note: Knowing how to facilitate the decision making process in someone without appearing to want it more than the they do is hard to learn, and even tougher to practice: 9 years of school and 25 years of practice and I still make mistakes with this.)
So, for those who want to learn more, I'll spend the next few blogs breaking down the psychology of those ideal recruits, including the anatomy of their decision making process.
In the meantime, send me your comments and stories either through the blog or my email.
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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