The real estate industry is filled with rejection.  There’s no getting around it.

You’ve probably reluctantly made this connection on your own:  Those who are the most successful in any sales process tend to be those who are the most comfortable with rejection.

When I started my first sales job, the initial thing my manager taught me was to repeat this mantra to myself:  “Some will. Some won’t. Who cares?”

He knew I would face rejection quickly and often.  My ability to emotionally disconnect from the negative feelings of rejection had to be overcome if I hoped to be successful.

The same principle applies to recruiting.  The recruiting process is filled with rejection.  Those who overcome the fear of rejection tend to be good recruiters.  Those who are paralyzed by it will languish.

How do you end up in the first group? We’ll learn from a talented Chinese immigrant who had to overcome rejection to pursue his dream of becoming an entrepreneur.

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We’ll wrap up our discussion on simplicity today by addressing how we can make the recruiting process feel simple to candidates who are engaging with your organization.

People are attracted to things they perceive as simple, and attraction changes the nature of recruiting.

If people are drawn to you and your team, it puts you in control of the recruiting process by allowing you to select the most talented candidates.

How do you make your recruiting process simple?  It’s not as easy as it may sound.

Albert Einstein once said,  “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

This is true for the recruiting process.  What seems simple and attractive to the candidate, takes quite a bit of planning and forethought.

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If your goal is to introduce someone to a new idea, simple beats complex every time.

During the recruiting process, candidates will be drawn to ideas and concepts that seem simple.  As we learned last time, this feeling of simplicity (what psychologist call “cognitive fluency”) is driven by familiarity.

If something is perceived as familiar, it feels simple and easy to engage.  It’s attractive.

So, here’s the challenge:  To recruit new-to-real estate agents, you need to take something that is very unfamiliar to candidates (starting a business, operating as an independent contractor, working in a completely new industry, etc.) and make it feel commonplace.

To show you how to do this, we’ll take a page from Steve Job’s playbook.  When he introduced the iPod in 2001, he had very similar obstacles to overcome.

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Simple is not easy.

If anything, simple is often much more difficult than complex.

This is especially true when designing and executing important business systems in your organization.  We tend to make things complex when we believe something is essential or critical, but simple tends to work the best.

Great thinkers have always known and operated by this principle.  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famous French writer once said, “You know you’ve achieved perfection not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.”

Is your recruiting process simple?  If not, find out why this should become one of your top priorities if you want it to be effective.

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