How to Recruit to your Real Estate Team

Recruiting is the lifeblood to any team or brokerage in the real estate industry. Not recruiting to a team or brokerage would be like a sales organization not generating leads. It just doesn't make sense. And I'm going to share with you the exact system that I have used to grow my real estate team from 12 agents to 50 agents in just under 24 months. And this podcast is specifically for team leaders and broker owners. I'm sharing my experience, good and bad, of growing my company Onyx Homes. If you want the closest possible look at doing that, you can go join our community that's totally free at onyxhomes.com/school, link in the description or wherever as well too. Now let's dive into content. The first part of recruiting is to understand the importance of it. We covered that in episode five. If you have not already watched that episode of the podcast, episode number five, I highly recommend watching that first. Now, if you have watched that, you should have a base understanding of how important recruiting is in the first place. Now one thing I want to make sure there's two points here. One is recruiting is no different than converting buyers, seller leads. If you are running a team, starting a team, growing a team, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're good at sales, which isn't even a prerequisite for actually recruiting anyway. So number one is recruiting is no different than converting buyer or seller leads. Second is you need to generate leads, which is also no difference. You need lead generation, lead conversion. Recruiting is very similar to converting listings or seller leads into listings. So here's the reality is leads turn into appointments, turn into recruits, just like leads turn into appointments, turn into deals. There's no difference here. It's just the actual process and who we're actually talking to is what changes. And this scares a lot of team leaders, but I'm going to share the literal exact thing where you could listen to this and set up your funnel in like today. So it's, it's also rather simple. So here's the exact funnel that I use to recruit to my team. And this is an, like a somewhat automated process. Obviously there's humans involved. Obviously this does take time, but mostly automated or at least up until the point where the book, the calendar is completely automated. So number one, first and foremost, lead generation from generating leads, we prompt them through automations to book a 20 minute phone call. This is a first interview and it is a phone call and it's 20 minutes. This is to screen for quality and a screen for them being a good fit or not. Then from there, the people that we feel like are a good fit, we bring into our team meeting for their in-person interview, which really isn't an interview. It's more of a show, don't tell. So we show them what it looks like to be a part of the team before we would ever tell them before we tell them about it, or instead of telling them about it. This is not a sales pitch. This is literally just them seeing what it's like to be on the team. And at the end of that, there is a Q and a for the recruits that come in and we do this in group setting as well. From that we either onboard or we don't depending on if we feel like they're a good fit or not, or if they're not interested, then that's fine too. So let's break this down one step at a time. Let's start talking first about lead generation, which is probably where most people get stuck is even just in starting. I'm going to talk about both what we do and then other things you could do. I am, if you know anything about me, I am a huge fan of inbound. I do not like, I don't enjoy anything outbound really at all. I never enjoyed any of that stuff when I was an agent and I don't enjoy that stuff as a team leader either. Not to say it doesn't work, it works fantastic. I just don't do it. What I do is job postings and content. So I'm going to go through the list. The first one is job postings because it's the most important. Now there is a lot of people that will say go put a job posting on wise hire or zip recruiter or like whatever, but indeed is the Google of job postings, job boards. So why you wouldn't go to Google, the number one by miles is beyond me. And it's also pay to play. Yes, you can post a job posting for free, but who do you think indeed is going to push the job posting more, yours that's for free or mine that has a large budget behind it or even a small budget behind it. They're going to push the person who's spending the most money, obviously it's their whole business model. So they are just like Google and they work almost on a pay per click or a dollar per day spend. Like if you've ever advertised on Google or meta, you understand that or really anywhere. So first is job postings. We're going to break this down into two points. The first point is you do have to spend money. So you're going to want to identify what your budget is for recruiting. So on our job postings, I generally choose to spend anywhere from 50 to $100 per day. And I like to have two different job postings going at the same time. Now my budget might be larger than yours. If your company sizes, if you're just getting started, you can get away with way less. We need to generate a lot of leads because we're growing fast. We're growing a large company. So don't get sucked into the how much we're spending. I just share that for reference. We recruit one to two agents every single week and we spend about $200 a day on indeed. So the second thing, which is equally as important is your job posting needs to be a actual sales letter. This needs to be a sales pitch explaining why somebody should join your team, why somebody might want to join your team. Now what you want to do with your sales, and this isn't a sales letter, which I've probably do a whole podcast on that for when I get into marketing, I'll talk about this is you want to be a magnet for the people that are a good fit for your company. Meaning that you're also going to push away everybody that's not a good fit and identifying your avatar instead of, and it better not be all real estate agents. Identifying who's actually a good fit to join your company is first and foremost, because you can speak directly to that person. So for example, for my team, I say there's two things that show us that an agent's a good fit. Number one, first and foremost, is that they are willing to follow a proven process. Number two is that they're actually willing to put in the work that's required to be successful. Now three and four that I don't really say all the time is we don't hire assholes and we have to make sure they're willing to deliver very, very high levels of customer service. So those are really the four things. We have to feel like the agents that are the best fit for our team are willing to follow a proven process. They're willing to put in the work required. They're not an asshole, meaning they're a culture fit. And number four is that they will give good customer service and ethical and all that fun stuff, right? So my sales letter reflects that. We only hire full-time, so part-time agents will be like, oh, bummer, I can't apply or they can't apply and they're just not going to be accepted, right? So you want to make sure you are rejecting people that are not a good fit with your sales letter, which will then attract the people that are a good fit. We talk about a lot of built-in accountability. Well guess what? Somebody that wants to be left alone reading our job posting is like, oh, this sounds miserable. I hate these guys. But somebody that knows they need accountability is going to love that. So it's good only. It is not bad because you're pushing people away. It's good because you're attracting only the right people. Okay. So do not, do not, do not just use the job posting, the generic real estate agent job description. Write your own. And it needs to be good. I would go to Hemingway.com, Hemingwayapp.com or Google it, whatever, and write it in there. Make sure it's written at a third grade level. I'm going a little bit deeper than I wanted to on this topic, but I think it's incredibly important that your sales letter's good. And a huge part of that comes from your actual offer to the agents has to be good. Your whole entire topic as well, too. All of this I cover, by the way, in our team building masterclass, but that's a whole nother thing. I'm trying to stay on topic. Lead generation. You have to go to Indeed and spend money. You can also post this everywhere else you want, but you have to have it on Indeed and you have to spend money. Okay. You're going to write a sales letter so that, which is your job posting, has to be compelling so that people want to actually apply to your team. Do not, under any circumstances, just use whatever the platform gives you for a job description for a real estate agent. Post team leaders, meaning like 95% of team leaders are one bad and two lazy, and they're doing the same thing. Meaning you will literally have the same job posting as half the teams or companies recruiting in your marketplace, which sounds crazy. Okay. Number one, job postings. The reason I'm spending a lot of time on this is because this is counted for probably 70% of all the agents we've ever recruited came only from Indeed. So just do it. When I say that, where I've tested spending the same money on all other platforms and Indeed is like 100x the best option, better than ZipRecruiter, better than LinkedIn, better than YSire, better than, those are the ones that I've tried and spend money on all those. All right. That's number one, job postings. Just do them. Number two, if you have any money left over in your budget, I also do mailing to examinees. So these are the new licensees. So in my state, yours might be different or in California, and we get a list every single Monday of everybody who has applied to get their real estate license. So we send them a nice letter and what we do is we use our lead magnet. We use our free school community as our lead magnet because it has all of our training and everything a new agent could possibly want to learn how to be a successful agent. So we use that as our lead magnet in our letter. Again, the letter is not join our company, we're so wonderful. The letter is here are some things I think you might find valuable. Agents will go to that free school community, they'll see what we're all about. They'll learn our sales stuff and then they can take the next step to join the team if they want. We get very high, very low volume, very, very high quality of agents that join us from this. We send this once a month and I think we spend like maybe a thousand bucks a month on this. It's very, very low, uh, overall, there's very little work involved in this is very easy, but it's very low volume and it's, it's nearly impossible to scale up unless you go larger geographically. All right. Number three is content. I think this is the biggest unlock I've had in my business career is just realizing I got into this business being very good at sales. And as I've grown my company, I've learned that, okay, I can be as good at sales as I want, but I can only talk to so many people at a time. And I have translated that into becoming a better marketer. I don't think I'm a fantastic marketer by any stretch, but I think I'm getting there and I am realizing that all of the best quality fits for our recruiting, but, uh, like pipeline, all watch our content. Our content helps our agents on our team sell more houses. Our content nurtures people in our recruiting funnel content converts people in our recruiting funnel. So creating content is not only just for the short term gratification of people will watch this video and go to onyxhome.com/school because a certain percentage of viewers will do that. But it's also that if you watch all of the podcast episodes in a row and you're like, wow, that was a lot of information. Super helpful. That just is going to generate more leads. So this is something that I've just continued to do more and more and more and more of my day time and calendar and focus goes, goes towards content creation. Now, tactically speaking, here is exactly what I do. What I started with. I started with creating one valuable piece of training content every single week and I still do that every single week to this day. That is also going to go out on an email newsletter. So I email my, my recruiting list, which is just every agent that I have on my email list. I email that list every single Thursday. We have 40 to 45% open rates. We get two to 3%, 4% of times click rates. And that is a very, very, very, very warm list. And we literally just train. And the goal here is I want to train agents better than their current manager does. And I do that by giving the same training that I give to my agents to every other agent in the marketplace. I have an, uh, I do not have a scarcity mindset of an abundance mindset and not worried about an agent using our strategies to sell more houses and they're on somebody else's team. It's totally fine. I hope they do. I love that they would. Uh, and I've actually got pictures of other agents on other teams using literally our slide deck for a buyer presentation and send me a message saying, Christian, I got a buyer agreement signed with your slide deck. Like, awesome. Thank you so much. It worked so well. Like that crushes. Uh, so creating content is incredibly valuable. So every single week you are going to send something valuable, value content, not, do you want to join my team? Valuable content. Here's how our buyer presentation, here's why our buyer presentation works. Here's our sales frameworks, whatever. Here's how to recruit to your team. Valuable. That wouldn't be a good piece, obviously, if you're recruiting less, but you get the point. Um, you're going to post that everywhere. So you're going to post it to your Facebook, your Instagram, your LinkedIn, your whatever. You're also going to email it to your list as well too. This over time will build up and up and up and up and up. I'm going to do a whole nother thing talking about this. I'm not going to have to too far in depth, but I will say this has been the biggest unlock I've had in the last 18 months or so is just the power of creating content. All right. Next is cold calling. You can absolutely just get on the phone and make phone calls and invite people to learn more about your company. Let me back up. Let me go back to content creation cause this goes for everything is create a lead magnet. Now what is a lead magnet? A lead magnet is something you give away for free or maybe at a very nominal cost, but like for free and it, you want to make that thing so valuable that they look at your company and be like, gosh, if they're free stuff, they're giving this away. Like what does it look like to actually work with them? And that's what you want to do. That's what I think you should do. That's what I do. So I use our free school community for this all the time. I say go to onyxhomes.com/school and you get our entire sales masterclass of everything that we train our agents on for sales. You also get a sneak preview on our team building masterclass on the absolute most important part, which is your financial model, as well as Alex Hermozzi scaling workshops. I paid several tens of thousands of dollars to go to those workshops. Those are my biggest takeaways and they're just right there for free. So you can get a lot of those lessons for free there. I also shared in videos, a lot of the takeaways from that, I share our takeaways that everything I go to. I also have, like I said, the other master classes, and then I share the most in-depth content or like intimate content, if you will, about growing your company in there as well. So that is what we've chose to use as our huge lead magnet, where we just put all of our stuff in one spot. Before that, I would have PDF. So I would say go to whateverlink.com, go to abconyxhomes.com and download our buyer presentation packet, or go to the link, whatever, right? Like have a call to action. And the reason I brought this back up is if I was to have a cold caller, I would not be having my cold caller call to say, Hey, join our team. I would have our cold caller say, Hey, I was talking to an agent in your office and they found our free community super value in our sales masterclass. Would it be okay if I sent that to you? And if they said no, then fine. If they said, yeah, it's free. Yeah, sure. Send it over. Then I would put them in that community and I let that lead magnet work that lead. That is why lead magnets are important. And that's why I brought it back up for cold calling. But you could just call people and say, do you want to join my team? Just like you call people and say, do you want to sell my house? Um, number, I think five is events. So we've hit job postings, by far the most important, mailing to examinees. I don't know. I get really high quality people from this, but like it's probably not the number two thing I would say to do is you're creating your content. And if you don't have a budget, that's number one, number four, cold or number whatever number cold calling. And then events would be the last one. You can host in-person physical events or you can do virtual events as well too. I've done webinars in the past to had a hundred agents show up. There's a lot more technicality that goes into that. You need to be good at, you know, funnels and schedulers and all that fun stuff, or you can just go live on your socials, which is fine. Um, I've also had some success with in-person events as well too. It's just, honestly, we get so much throughput from the other things. It's really not worth the brain damage of doing events yet. It's something we're absolutely going to do in the future. Just not something we do right now. I know agents that, that have a lot of success with it. I just, um, I feel like we're probably not quite right. We that's not the best use of our resources. So we're not doing it now, but anyway, the whole overall topic for number one is lead generation. So you just have to generate leads. So job postings, mailing to examinee list, creating content, cold calling events. What I, I'm sure I miss some stuff, but those are the basics that you just have to generate people that are interested in your company. Now from there, you want to make sure you get them to book an appointment with you. You want them to book an appointment with you. This is where I say it's completely automated. So anybody that is inquiring on our team at all goes to our website, which you're, you're welcome to check out. Go to onyxhomes.com/agent, where we tell them everything they could possibly want to know about our team. If they drop their information, we get it. And we set up autoresponders, meaning like we email them and text them, Hey, I saw your interest in our team. Here's the calendar link to book our call. And it just goes to a Calendly link for a 20 minute phone call. Pro tip here, increase your conversions by sending what is called a video sales letter. When they're booking or before they booked the appointment, what a video sales letter is basically is your recorded best sales pitch of why they should do the thing. So again, if you just want to check this out, go to onyxhomes.com/agent, feel free to inquire if you want to, uh, if you book on the calendar, just like cancel it. So you don't waste our, uh, time. I would appreciate that. Or like, let us know, Hey, I'm just trying out your funnel. Totally fine with me. Uh, just don't waste the actual time of the phone call, please. Um, the VSL, the video sales letter is going to be your best sales pitch on video to your ideal, like whoever just opted in that is going to increase your conversions across the board. It's a pro tip we got from acquisition.com and it works incredibly well. All right, let's talk about Calendly. If you don't already have a Calendly make one, you can make a free Calendly with one calendar like scheduling thing. And you might want to, it's like 10 or 15 bucks a month. I don't really care what you do, but you have to have one for this. So you're going to set up a 20 minute calendar and you're going to make sure it's synced with your calendar, G Suite or whatever you use. And then you're going to be able to send this link to people and they will be able to book based on your availability and you can set up whatever parameters you want. Maybe only take them in the afternoon. Maybe only take them in the morning. You want to block off the weekends, whatever, but you're going to have your calendar on there for 20 minute phone call only. Do not, do not do zoom calls. Too many of them are going to be a total waste of time for you to need to be in front of a computer. So just make them phone calls. You are going to ask four qualifying questions. We ask, what brought you to our job posting in the first place? This is going to have them tell you why if they're brand new to the business, why they got into the business. If they have, if they're in the business already and they're switching brokerages, they're going to tell you why they're switching. So what brought you to our job posting in the first place is the first question. Next, I would say if they're, if they're not, if it's not clear that they're full time in the business, I would ask some version of what is your career, what does your business look like right now? Or what is your plans for transition? And I'm trying. understand for us at least if they're full-time or not because we only hire full-time. Third question is what is the most important thing you're looking for in whatever team or brokerage you join? That is them telling us how we need to close them and what's the most important thing to them. Last question is what would you consider to be a successful year and this is just us getting a good idea of what they would be happy with. If they say hey Christian I'd be happy to sell one house a year that person's probably not a good fit for our team. All right those are your four questions do not overthink this just make it count only and then in you're gonna generate leads let's go tactical here you're gonna generate leads and then you're gonna set up email sequence and text sequence if you can to ask them to book the interview. Here is a crazy story is that for the first year and a half when we recruited from 12 to 50 agents the email campaign we sent was the same email five times literally the exact same email. It just said hey here's a link to our calendar hey you're interested here's a link to the calendar book it and we sent literally that same email day one day three day seven for 15 30 45 that was that we sent the same email five times and the text message was some version of hey saw you inquired on our team here's the link to schedule your interview and it do not ever complicate this and we've made it better since then so if you go inquire now you're gonna get way better emails a little bit fancier more marketing involved but it did not start like that it doesn't need to be all right that is number two is your calumny. Here's a pro tip you can follow up at scale by sending that email every single week so I talked about this earlier when I talked about content your training content you send your email list you're just gonna have your link to your calendar in there or the link to your website so they can inquire and every single email you send if they want to join your team they can click the join my like join my team and they can book their calendar right there all right number three so if they're qualified from that 20-minute phone call you are then gonna invite them into your team meeting this is where you show what it's like to be a part of your team versus telling them about it showing is gonna be way way way better it's gonna be way more effective and what this is actually probably the most valuable part of what this will make you do is it's gonna make your team meetings better it's gonna make them more valuable for the agents you already have and it's gonna make them more really really valuable for the agents that are interviewing to join your company it's gonna give them a pretty darn good idea of what it looks like to be on the team and they get to meet other agents on the team talk to them I would say a pro tip here would be have your like most trusted agent on your team already go up to the prospect the recruit and ask them like to vet them a little bit like even just like hey Christian that person was weird is invaluable in this recruiting because they don't necessarily know the recruits don't necessarily know that this is also an interview after the team meeting you can do a Q&A so when you when you get your automated funnel really cranking you're likely to have multiple people in every single team meeting like we usually have two to five people every single week in our team meeting they're checking us out so we do a group Q&A after and I just say hey open open forum there's no question you can't ask me that I wouldn't answer so everybody has the same questions to fire away it's gonna be awkward for one question and then we'll get started so I do a group Q&A and at the end of that I just basically say hey here's next steps if you want to join let us know if you don't want to join let us know and step number four is you onboard the ones that you actually want now here is that was a very quick step number four but step number three is caught as if they're qualified invite them into the team meeting there let me go deeper here but that is really as simple as this I like having somebody else talk to them to make sure that whoever did the initial interview is probably you you didn't miss anything right I mean does this person you know the obvious red flags let me just put it that way or they're probably on their best behavior talking to you but if another agent goes up to them they might show their true colors and that would be a good red flag to know then versus later so then you go through your team meeting which you're gonna make sure is absolutely fantastic every week forever you should be doing weekly team meetings also where you're showing them what it's like to be on the team not telling them now in your Q&A if you're implementing this right now here is my advice is bring in a notebook for you to take notes when you're doing the Q&A and what you'll do is your every single question they ask write down the question the reason you're gonna do this is because you're gonna add these questions to your sales follow-up and sales process on the front end over time so if you realize that nobody understands what your splits and comp structures beforehand you should add that to your front end meaning that should be on your website or at least after they've scheduled then they get your comp plan ours is right on our website I have no problems showing our entire comp plan to our website so that's why you want to list all the questions as well too also it'll probably show you what they like and don't like right if they're not asking questions about something it's cuz I don't care about it or maybe it's just super obvious I don't know but that would be what I would do so that you can iterate over time if you get every single person every single group ask you the same five questions put those questions in your VSL your video sales letter ahead of time and make sure it's in your website in your offer packet as well then like I said number four bring on the ones that you want don't bring anybody on that you do not like or don't think would be a good fit I choose to not this is me personally I choose to not handle any objections whatsoever if somebody says hey Christian I'd like to join your team but your splits are too low I would say yep they probably are too low it's totally fine there's a hundred thousand other teams out there I wish you the best of luck and I don't have any problem with that whatsoever I'm not gonna arm wrestle somebody into joining my company because I feel like if I arm wrestle them now they're gonna leave for higher splits later and I just I'd rather them just never join is that wrong I don't know maybe but I honestly choose to play the very very long game I'd rather somebody go see the grasses greener or not somewhere else and they either never never join the team never come back but like I don't want anybody to think that I like desperately needed them to join the company because we don't one and I don't like hard clothes I never have I want the this is where the I was good at sales when I got into the business and this is where the getting good at marketing stuff makes it to where if somebody's been exposed to all of the marketing up front I really feel like it does 90% of the work and if if if they've been exposed to that 90% they still don't want to join me pushing them over the edge is probably not the best thing for either one of us and I've had plenty of people that have joined like want like it needed to be pushed over the edge and I we just don't do it and then they go join another team and then they call us back in six months because it wasn't what they thought so I prefer that way that's just my personal opinion you can do it however you want if you need the agent or let me explain a different way is if you feel like you need to arm wrestle people to join your company what you offer probably just isn't very compelling is the reality which is a whole other episode in itself is your offer but if you're having to arm wrestle everybody to join your company your offer is probably just not very compelling all right so let's dive in again tactically if you're taking notes this is like right down if you're listening watching whatever open your notes app get a pen and paper out I would write these down these are our benchmarks based on job postings organic content mailers is really the only lead generation that we do and here's our exact metrics from this is from the year 2024 okay number of leads genera not number of leads generated but the percentage of leads generated that automatically book a call automated 100% automated I do not call any of these people I do not text any I don't do anything with these people if they do not book my calendar somewhere between 15 and 30 percent this fluctuates a little bit I think it depends on on the lead quality of what you have set up on indeed I think if you if you set anybody can apply they don't have to have a license whatever it's probably gonna be close to that 15% and you have a lower cost per lead what we what we have seen is that if we say hey you have to have a license it's more like one-third or 30% of people will book but the cost per lead triples like it's the same thing doubles whatever so from leads generated to booked phone calls is 15 to 30% I would I would do your math based on probably 30% most of our quarters were closer to 30% leads to booked phone calls 30% so we've got a hundred leads 30% of them will book a phone call which is 30 from the book phone call to second interview half which brings us to 14 so 50% of people that book a call will ship will schedule for the in-person 30% of the people that schedule the second interview at the team meeting in person will actually on board so if we had 15 people 14 people scheduled to come in we would get about four of them something like that math is a little bit off but you get the point there so those are the metrics from lead to phone calls 30% from phone call to second interviews 50% second interview to on board 30% now this over overall translate to somewhere between a two to five percent conversion ratio and if this sounds familiar to generating or converting online leads like Zillow Redfin realtor.com even Google pay-per-click it's because it's the same thing as I said meaning we need to generate 20 to 50 leads to onboard one agent now I will give you one more data point here is 30% of the agency you onboard will not be a good fit and you will probably very quickly have to board. We've tried so many things to make this not the case, but 30% of the people that you hire will need to be off-boarded rather quickly. So what that really means is we need to increase that by about 30%, the amount of leads, by about 30%. So let's say you need 40 to 70 recruiting leads in order to generate one quality agent. And I'm going to tell you something you probably tell agents all the time. You are not generating enough leads in order to hit your goal, just period, especially with recruiting. You're probably not doing it with your sales either, but that is the absolute truth. Now here's a pro tip for you. You can absolutely remind you, this is almost entirely hands-off. From lead generation to booked calendar, us picking up the phone at the time that that calendar was scheduled is the first manual thing that happens. And we still bring people on at this rate. Could we give those numbers higher? Yes, of course. But let me ask this way. Would it be easier to double our conversion rate through this funnel that we've been working on for two years, or would it be easier or cheaper to 2x the amount of leads that are coming in? It would 1000% be easier to 2x the number of leads coming in. Absolutely. Because us playing around with the funnel and trying to figure out how we can 2x conversion will do two different things. One, it has just as good of a chance of lowering conversion rather than making it better. It also means that if you're so concerned about your actual conversion rate, I have found your team as a whole, meaning like whoever's involved in recruiting, will actually get more focused on just hiring people to hit a conversion rate versus hiring the right people. I'd rather have a lower conversion rate hiring the right people with more leads than a higher conversion rate hiring the wrong people just to hit the number to prove a point. So generate more leads is the pro tip there. Now, if you are getting these types of conversions, or if you're not getting these types of conversions, as I said this earlier, or you feel like you have to arm wrestle everybody, it is because your offer sucks, which is going to be covered in another episode. I'm really looking forward to that one because it's something that I am very, very passionate about. And it ties in with the financial model, which is something we talked about in an earlier episode as well. So that's the episode. If you want the closest possible look at us growing our company, go to onyxhomes.com/school with a K. It's in the description and everywhere else you might want to look to find it. Also, if you enjoy this stuff, like, subscribe, do all the things. And if you really, really liked it, share this with another team leader, business owner, broker owner that you also think might like it. That is another episode down in the story of building Onyx Homes from start to finish. I'll see you next time.