How commercial real estate principals should approach recruitment.

CRE Success Principle: If you treat recruitment like an emergency, you'll keep making emergency hires. Build relationships with potential candidates before you start hiring, just as you build relationships with prospects before there's a listing.

One of the most common frustrations I hear from commercial real estate principals is that they simply can't find good people when they need to fill a vacant role in their business.

I understand why many leaders believe that the talent pool is thin. But after having this conversation countless times, I've found the problem is often not the market. It's the recruitment process.

Recruit Like You Prospect

Most principals are excellent at business development. They have target lists, build relationships, follow up consistently, and understand that results come from sustained effort.

Recruitment deserves the same considered and proactive approach.

If you're only looking for candidates when someone resigns, you're already behind. The best hires often come from relationships you've built months before a position opens.

Stop Hiring Under Pressure

Urgency changes decision making.

When you need someone immediately, it's easy to hire the person who's available rather than the person who's the right fit. That's how businesses end up repeating the same hiring mistakes.

Instead, build a pipeline of quality candidates before you need them.

Use multiple recruitment channels, including employee referrals, your personal and professional network, and directly reach out to people you rate in the industry.

The principals who consistently hire well aren't accessing a different talent pool. They're simply investing more consistent effort into the recruitment process.

If you'd like to improve your hiring outcomes, so that you can build a stronger team, listen to episode 278 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for the complete framework.

I also invite you to download our Commercial Real Estate Hiring Playbook – which includes a 7-Step Recruitment Process that you can easily follow – at cresuccess.co/recruitment 

Episode transcript:

Here's a conversation that I have with commercial real estate principals more often than almost any other.

It's about hiring. They need to hire. Someone has left, or the business has grown to a point where they need another person on the team.

So, they put the word out, maybe a job ad. Perhaps they ask around, a few candidates come through, one of them interviews well, seems sharp, knows the market, says the right things, so they offer the role.

The person starts, and within a couple of months it's clear it's not working. The performance isn't there, the fit isn't right, and the principal is back to where they started, except now they've lost more time.

The conclusion that is usually drawn from this experience is that good people are just hard to find, that experienced commercial real estate professionals who are willing to work hard are a rare commodity.

The market is thin, and we're competing for the same small pool of talent as everyone else.

I fully understand why that's the conclusion that many people make, but in most cases, it's more of a belief than the real problem.

Welcome to episode 278 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak, here to help commercial real estate principals to build an agency that runs without them, so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

So, when a commercial real estate principal tells me that they can't find good people, my first question is always, "What does your recruitment activity actually look like right now?"

And the answer is usually some version of, "I've got a job ad up, I've asked a few people if they know anyone, and I'm keeping an eye out."

That's it. That's the recruitment effort. An ad, a couple of conversations, and some general awareness that a hire needs to happen.

Sometimes they've got a recruiter on contingency who they're willing to accept candidates from as well.

Compare that to how the same principal approaches business development.

They've got a list of targets. They block out time to make calls regularly. They track their activity. They follow up. They build relationships with potential clients before there's a deal on the table because they know that is how you win work when the opportunity eventually comes.

They treat new business development as a continuous, deliberate activity that runs whether or not they need the revenue right now.

They do not apply any of that thinking to recruitment, and then they wonder why the results are different.

Look, it's true that the supply of good people in our industry, commercial real estate, is genuinely limited, particularly when you compare that against the residential real estate market.

But the principals who consistently hire well are not finding a different pool of candidates.

They're just putting in more effort, more consistency across more channels, and that effort compounds over time in exactly the same way that prospecting effort does, too.

I want to pose a question to you, and this is a question that I ask almost every commercial real estate principal I work with when recruitment comes up.

And I want to challenge you to answer this question honestly rather than optimistically.

If you gave yourself a score out of 10 for the effort that you are currently putting into recruitment, not the intention, not the desire to hire, but the actual activity that you are putting in, what would that score be?

Now, for most commercial real estate principals, the honest answer is somewhere between a two and a four.

Sometimes it's lower, and I very rarely get a score higher than five the first time I ask that question.

And here's what's interesting about that. The same principals who score themselves a 3 out of 10 on recruitment will give themselves a score of eight or 9 out of 10 on business development effort.

They know how to work hard at finding new business. They've been doing it for years, and it’s sort of in their DNA. It's how they think about planning their week.

Recruitment hasn't been built into their DNA. It's not how they think about the week. It's something that happens when the gap becomes urgent.

And when something only happens reactively in response to pressure, the quality of the outcome is almost always lower than when it's a planned, consistent activity.

A 3 out of 10 effort will produce 3 out of 10 results, and then the conclusion is that the market is thin.

But the market didn't produce a 3 out of 10, the effort did.

Look, there's a specific pattern that comes from reactive hiring, from only looking seriously when you've got an immediate need, and most principals have experienced it.

If you're hiring under pressure, the bar shifts. You're not looking for the right person anymore. You're looking for someone who can fill that gap

And let me tell you, those are different searches. The right person might take three months to find. Someone who can fill the gap might be available next week.

When the pressure is on, next week starts to look very attractive.

So you move quickly. You conduct one or two interviews. The candidate seems fine, maybe even good. You make the offer.

They start, and then gradually the gap between what you needed and what you hired becomes clear.

Not because the new employee is bad, but because you hired for availability rather than fit. And the role wasn't defined clearly enough so you could tell the difference.

This cycle repeats because the conditions that produced it don't change.

The next time you need to hire, you'll be under pressure again, you'll be reactive again, and you'll be choosing from whoever is available rather than whoever is truly the right fit for your business.

The only way out of this cycle is to change the conditions, which means doing recruitment work before you need to hire so that when the gap opens, you're not starting from scratch.

The reframe that tends to shift things for principals I work with is a simple one.

Recruitment is just like prospecting. It works in the same way. It requires the same discipline, and it produces results in the same timeframe, which means you need to start before you need the results.

Think about how you approach new business development right now. You probably have targets. You've got a list of people and businesses that you're working to build relationships with.

You reach out on a consistent basis, not just when you've got something specific to pitch. You stay in contact. You build credibility over time.

And when the moment comes up when they need an agent, you're already in a conversation with them.

Apply that thinking to recruitment. You've got a list of people who you'd like to work with. I used to call it warehousing candidates.

You have a list of people in the market who you rate, whose reputation you've noticed. You'd want to have them on your team if the opportunity arose.

So, build a relationship with them. Stay in contact. A simple text message when they've closed a deal is one way to do that.

Become known to them as a good operator who runs a business that's worth joining, so that when you're ready to make a move or when you need to hire, you're not starting a conversation from scratch.

This is not complicated. This is the same thing you already know how to do. It just requires applying it to a problem that you've been treating a little bit differently.

Beyond the prospecting approach, there are channels that most principals underuse when it comes to recruitment.

And because they underuse them, they end up competing only on the most visible and the most crowded channels, the job ad or sometimes approaches via recruiters, and then wonder why the results are so thin.

So, let's look at some other channels.

The first channel is your existing team. The people who already work for you, know the market, they know who is good, and they know who might be looking.

An employee referral program, and I've got a specific process around what this can look like in an independent boutique or franchised commercial real estate agency.

An employee referral program can surface candidates you would never have found any other way.

People refer people they'd actually want to work with, and no one else is a better evangelist for your business than someone who already chooses to work for you.

And this typically produces a better cultural fit than other channels.

A second channel is your professional network. So, agents, property managers, and operators that you're dealing with regularly, they also know who is good in the market.

And the opportunity I think is obvious because commercial real estate is a small and well-connected world, right?

And a quiet conversation with the right person can open a door that you didn't know was there.

Being known as someone who is growing, who runs a good operation, who is looking for good quality people, if you can get that word out there, that does some of the recruitment work on your behalf.

The third channel I want to mention is direct outreach by you. Identifying people whose work you've noticed, someone whose name keeps coming up, someone who's just closed a deal that caught your attention, someone who you've been seeing in the market presenting themself well, and reaching out to them directly.

Not to offer them a job, just to introduce yourself, to have a conversation, to start building a relationship.

Most principals find this uncomfortable because it feels a little bit presumptuous. But in a market where good people are genuinely scarce, direct outreach to people you admire is not presumptuous, it's just smart prospecting.

Of course, job ads and recruiters do still have a role to play, but I think they work best as one of many channels, not as the only source of new candidates.

A principal who is running all of these channels simultaneously with the same consistency they would apply to business development will find that the supply problem looks considerably less severe than it previously did.

If recruitment has felt like a problem of supply, like the market just doesn't have enough good people, then I'd encourage you to consider the scoring question that I asked earlier in this episode.

What score would you honestly give yourself based on your recruiting effort right now? And is that score consistent with the results you're expecting?

Because in most cases, the commercial real estate principals who are consistently hiring well are not finding a different market.

They're just treating recruitment the way they treat prospecting. Consistently, with a list, across multiple channels, and they do it with high priority before there's immediate need for it.

If you're looking for a structured way to think through and upgrade your recruiting process, I put together a resource specifically for commercial real estate principals.

It's called Upgrade Your Hiring Process, and you can access it at cresuccess.co/recruitment

And if you'd like to have a talk through what better recruitment looks like in your specific business, including an employee referral program or anything else that we've covered in this episode, you can find me on LinkedIn, Darren Krakowiak.

A link to my profile is in the show notes, and send me a DM so we can have a chat.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon