Can’t join us in person at Inman Connect New York? Don’t miss out on the game-changing insights and strategies shared by over 250 industry-leading speakers across 75+ carefully curated sessions. With a Virtual Pass, you’ll get all the tools you need to navigate challenges and seize new opportunities — delivered straight to your screen, wherever you are!
Office life can be fast and challenging. When this causes us to hire fast just to fill positions, take the next person in line because it’s easy or when we don’t make sure the fit is good, we create many avoidable issues for ourselves and our agents in the office.
Your staff drives your office, and the team will only be as strong as your weakest staff member. By hiring the right people, you will watch your office grow and succeed in the way that it should, and your agents and customers will experience exceptional service. Having a great, effective staff in place is one of the biggest things that you can do for the retention of your agents.
Your agents spend more time dealing with your staff than with you or anyone else. These can be good interactions with your agents or, when it’s not good, cause your agents to look for another brokerage.
Agents like to feel comfortable, and they like the office part of their lives to be easy and efficient as the rest of their job is challenging enough. They need this part of their business to be taken care of at a high level, and they deserve it.
Hire and train
In my experience, the most important thing to do when hiring new staff is to hire personality and train skills. A person who is willing and able, with a positive personality and attitude, can learn to do anything.
Another equally important thing to keep in mind is to always keep the position open until you find that great fit, regardless of how long it takes. Any time that I have broken these two rules it has never worked out well for me.
Hiring the wrong people will slow the growth of your office, lead to unnecessary staff turnover and just make your office an uncomfortable place to do business. On the other hand, hiring the right people will increase growth, keep your agents coming into the office because they like your staff and find them helpful and make your office a fun place to be.
Think about the last time that you stayed at a hotel and what that felt like. The staff either made it great, made you feel good and wanting to stay there again, or they may have made you feel like going someplace else.
You never met the manager of the hotel. The experience depends on the staff and is similar to your office. You won’t be able to stand next to your staff all day long, so they have to be the right people. When hiring, it’s very easy to fill positions but very hard to fill them with great people.
Follow these five tips below, and you will be on your way to enjoying an office that is not only running smoothly and profitable but is also a lot of fun to go to every day for you and your employees and, most of all, your agents.
- Hire personality; train skill. Type A personalities will give you what you need. Personalities don’t change, so what you hire will be what you get.
- Be patient. Keep that position open regardless of how long it takes. Resist the urge to fill it because the office is temporarily busy and chaotic. Filling it with the wrong person will be worse, making managing your office a difficult daily chore as you try to get the wrong people to do what’s needed. They never will.
- Choose wisely. Hire the person that will be the best person for you and your agents. The person who will make the office better. Not your friend, somebody else’s friend or the person who is hanging around and needs the position.
- Have multiple meetings. Meet with the person more than once over a week or two. This will give you much more information so that you can make the correct decision. This also weeds out the people who don’t really want the job because they won’t want to go through the process. Try not to make it drag on forever, however, as good people are in demand and need to work.
- Make changes when needed. Often, when we have our positions filled, we don’t want to shake things up. This causes us to keep people even when they are no longer doing their jobs well or contributing to the office’s success.
We may wait a long time to find the right employee, but when it comes to changing an employee, there can be no hesitation. Of course, we try to educate them and try to get them to perform at their expected level, but when you are past this point, make the change. You owe that to your staff and your hard-working agents.
Things are always changing, so getting effective at staff management will serve you well. Hire like a pro, and make your office all it deserves to be.
Joseph Santini is a managing broker at Coldwell Banker Realty in Boca Raton, Florida. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
