What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity and handle stress and change effectively. People who are resilient tend to have a positive outlook, a sense of control over their lives, and strong social support networks. They are also able to learn from their experiences and use that knowledge to cope with future challenges.
Through experience, education, and introspection, one can grow and strengthen their resilience over time. It is frequently described as a “mental muscle” that can be developed through instruction, repetition, and experience.
Resilience can help individuals and teams cope with stress, uncertainty, and change and perform at their best even in challenging situations. It’s a valuable trait in any field, but especially in dynamic and fast-paced industries such as real estate, where agents may have to face rejection, tight deadlines, and market fluctuations.
Resilience as a tool to help you recruit new agents
As a team leader or broker recruiting new agents, it’s important that negative emotions and setbacks don’t bring about poor decisions. There will always be challenges, moving goalposts and adversity, most of which are out of our control.
Since you can’t control everything, you have to stay resilient and move forward confidently regardless of the circumstances. While they’re frustrating, setbacks in the recruiting process offer numerous opportunities to step back, assess, reset, and power onward.
Here are a couple new ways to approach a few recruiting setbacks you’ve likely encountered by being resilient:
Fierce competition for agents
According to a recent NAR study, the median tenure for a Realtor at their present firm is 5 years, which makes competition for agents very competitive.
What kind of impression have you been making with new recruits?
Reviewing previous candidate correspondence is a good place to start. After that, take a step back and reevaluate the impressions your recruiting communications are leaving.
If you were the intended recipient, consider whether you would find the message to be sincere and personalized. Incorporate feedback from your team members as well. If your emails sound stilted or robotic, a candidate won’t be persuaded by the best opportunity.
Particularly when trying to reach passive candidates during the recruiting process, start with a personal connection. Prior to discussing particular opportunities, focus on enhancing the candidate experience and building stronger relationships. In order to demonstrate that you have done your research on the candidate, this can be as easy as rewriting the questions and exchanges.
Recruiting slumps
Once upon a time, you had a sizable network of skilled agents. However, it appears that there simply aren’t as many connections with qualified talent these days. It can be challenging to establish and maintain genuine connections with candidates.
Obtain feedback on the points where connections between candidates may have failed.
What stage of the hiring process does there seem to be a noticeable dropoff? To learn what appealed to them and what made your communication stand out, you should also examine the candidates with whom you previously established strong connections.
Was it a direct connection or a referral?
In addition, now might be a good time to evaluate your referral program. How can you encourage these connections through your network or recommendations from candidates who have already been hired?
How to continue to build resilience
- In particular when external circumstances are beyond your control, learn from mistakes and be kinder to yourself. Recognize your successes and take pride in them, but also consider how you can grow from your failures.
- Maintain a positive outlook. According to the law of attraction, thinking positively produces favorable outcomes; therefore, since like attracts like, try to avoid having any negative thoughts as much as you can. Instead of battling those things you cannot change, accept them.
- Take charge of situations rather than letting them control you by believing in your abilities.
- Instead of just following others’ lead, adapt and prepare by assessing what is to come and developing your own strategy.
- Develop your emotional intelligence; identify what affects you most and plan ahead for coping mechanisms. It’s important to know how to deal with any negative emotions rather than pretending not to be affected by anything.
Almost any challenge can be overcome by resiliency and problem-solving skills, giving you the ability to enhance the recruiting process and build a stronger talent pool.
