Is there an easier, more intuitive way to recruit agents? Lone Wolf Technologies thinks so. The company recently launched Recruit, an artificial-intelligence (AI) recruiting tool for brokers.
Traditional Recruiting
Mark Miles, Director of Operations and Technology for Dream Town Realty, understands the challenges of the recruitment process well. With 400 agents at his Chicago-based firm, Miles previously relied on traditional recruitment methods.
For years, brokers have relied on data sources such as Broker Metrics, Miles points out. “This provided raw data, remedial searching, and a lot more data analysis,” explains Miles. “You’ve got to manually go through and extract the data—a very time-consuming process. You’re sorting, compiling, using Excel spreadsheets, and using an outside CRM to track everything. Recruit does all that for you,” says Miles.
Tap the Power of AI
These days, Miles turns to Recruit to help him find the right candidates and track the recruitment process.
“The coolest thing that [AI] does is that you can launch a search by identifying existing agents or brokers within your offices whom you want to replicate,” says Miles. “Recruit then uses AI to go to the pool of brokers outside your company and matches them on a rating system.” As the system learns and ingests more data, it gets better and more accurate.
How Recruit Works
By building custom search profiles based on your favorite brokers and agents, Recruit leverages publicly available data from your MLS to crunch nearly three dozen metrics and assign what’s called a Fit Score to each agent it unearths. Recruit then ranks individuals in order of the best fit based on your criteria. Search results might yield more than a hundred names, but the best matches are at the top of the list. The further you go down the list, the less relevant the match. That’s what drew Miles to Recruit in the first place—its ease of use and its ability to provide accurate, targeted results.
With Recruit, Miles searches not only for individual dollar volume and units, but also where they do their business—not something that’s readily available on other platforms. “When you drill into the data further, you could see the last 12 months of production, if there was an increase or decrease, the average sales price, and the total sales split into the buying and listing side,” explains Miles, noting this is relevant to understanding the local talent.
Real World Example
Miles offers one example of how recruiting using AI can be a game-changer. Suppose you’ve got eight top brokers across your company that you want to “replicate,” meaning you want to find other brokers with similar business. Using traditional data searches might yield results for several dozen brokers with the same features or business models. The problem? They might be in geographic locations where you don’t do business. Among other metrics Recruit uses, its AI component allows you to specifically target your criteria across the market you define. [LB1]
Best Practices
The most import thing is to understand your existing agent base, advises Miles. “Of those agents, identify who best provides for your brokerage in whatever aspects you deem attractive,” he says. Clearly identifying individuals from your internal population allows Recruit to mimic those whom you feel best contribute to your brokerage and then provide a hit list of similar individuals to recruit.
“Recruit’s biggest value proposition is the ability to identify existing top producers in your company, conduct a custom search, and get a FIT score with best-matched agents or brokers,” says Miles. A close second? The recruiting tasks and follow-up component. “It’s flexible and allows you to check the status of recruits, assign tasks, track follow-up activities, identify who’s working with specific recruits—all of which streamline the recruiting process and eliminate crossover tasks.”
Look beyond top producers, advises Miles. Revenue volume is important, but you could also look at newer or mid-producing agents bringing in $2-4 million per year. “If you’ve got the right programs internally and provide them with support, you can turn them into agents producing $4-8 million per year,” he says. “You can coach, mentor, and train these agents to the next level. You don’t need to focus solely on the mega-producers to elevate your business.”
The Early Payoff
Miles notes that it’s too early to gauge a success rate with Recruit since he’s only been using it for a month. “We haven’t specifically recruited anyone just yet through Recruit,” says Miles, pointing out how the recruitment process is generally a long-term, relationship-building effort unless you’re recruiting people right out of school. “But as far as time savings, it’s huge,” he notes.
Lisa Beach is an Orlando freelance journalist, copywriter, and content marketing writer. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Parade, Islands, Good Housekeeping, USA Today, Costco Connection, and dozens more. Check out her writer’s website.
