I received lots of lively discussion from the last WorkPuzzle blog I wrote.  Some of it was very positive.  For example, the general manager of a large real estate company on the East Coast noted,

“[One of the managers you recently met with] hired seven new licensees in April.  Six of these new hires are under the age of 35.  It has changed the office dynamic in a couple of weeks.”

While others were less excited.  The owner of a prominent real estate company in the Midwest wrote,

“[What you’re saying] makes sense on paper, Ben, but we sure haven’t seen it.  In fact, we had four or five under thirty, quick in/quick out hiring failures in our flagship office, to the great discouragement of our manager there.

[Our executive team] has talked about a quality we call 'being settled' that an under thirty needs to have before they really take real estate as something more than an alternative to waiting tables.  Being settled often means being married or partnered up 'permanently,' and that spouses or partners have a solid, real, job.  Absent being settled, these young folk seem to be drifting and real estate is deadly for them.  They don’t have the discipline it takes.  I continue to be intrigued that you are bullish on this hiring sector.”

One of the executives from the same company added,

“I certainly don’t know how to build it into a profile, but with both young and not-so-young, one of the largest determining factors is willingness to embrace the concept of commission-only and to invest money and time into the start-up [of a new] career.”

There is no doubt this is a challenging task.  Figuratively, I’ve only provided you a prospector’s map to the location of a site that has valuable gems.  Locating the site is the easy part.  Mining the gems is much more risky, difficult, and frustrating.

I know many of you have noticed patterns (ex. “being settled”) as you’ve done your own mining for hires.  So, please email me what you’ve learned and I’ll share some of these best practices in an upcoming WorkPuzzle discussion.

While experience is probably the best teacher, we can also look to research to help us be more effective hiring managers.  Daniel McGinn (a contributor to Inc. Magazine) recently highlighted research done by professors Edward Mungai and S. Ramakrishna Velamuri, on the characteristics of individuals who start businesses.

The starting point for the research was the existence of several studies that firmly established that children of entrepreneurs are two to three time more likely to launch out on their own than are the kids of traditional salary earners.

But digging further into the data provided some interesting insights:

“The researchers plumbed the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal data set run by the University of Michigan that has followed nearly 8,000 representative U.S. families.  First, they identified people who left traditional jobs to become self-employed.  Using the family income data, the researchers determined how the businesses fared in subsequent years.

They looked for signs of a start-up gone bad:  founders who were later unemployed, left the business after suffering losses, or reentered the traditional work force at a lower wage.  Next, they looked at the kids of these entrepreneurs and determined how old they were when their parents ran companies.  Researchers then examined whether the children ultimately became self-employed themselves.

The researchers found that kids who were young adults (18 to 21) when their parents ran companies seemed to be most influenced by Mom's or Dad's choice of career path.  The research also confirms that parents who fail in a business seem to act as 'negative role models,' making their kids significantly less likely to launch a company.  But this was mainly true for older kids who had seen a parent's business crumble.  Younger children were not as affected.”

Is this research the holy grail for hiring young agents?  I don’t think so.  But, it is one factor that may contribute to your success as a hiring manager.  Combined with other best practices, we may be able to piece together a “field manual” for bringing young people into real estate.

What have you noticed in hiring young agents?

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. 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.