Find and Hire Rock Star Real Estate ISAs

What are the best places to find awesome ISAs for your real estate business?

We hear this question a lot at Smart Inside Sales. Many team leaders and real estate business owners struggle with finding and hiring inside sales agents who perform well, contribute to the business, and last for the long term. It’s frustrating and expensive to hire the wrong candidate, especially if you don’t understand what you are doing wrong.

Hiring Real Estate ISAs: Treat It Like Lead Generation

The important thing to remember when hiring new inside sales agents is that you need to treat it similar to lead generation. Finding the right candidates to work with you is literally lead generation for your company. What does that mean? Run ads for the position on Indeed and other job websites, and aim for a high volume of candidates. You should be trying to generate 20 to 30 resumes of potential hires every week. If your ads aren’t generating that many candidates, then tweak and revise them.

Once your ads are bringing in sufficient numbers of resumes, that’s when you start screening them and building your short list.

I know what you’re thinking…that all sounds really obvious and is already what I’ve been doing with bad results. Well, frankly, the reason you’ve been getting bad results is because you haven’t been screening and narrowing down your candidates in the best way possible.

How Real Estate ISAs Are Normally Hired

The problem with the way most real estate team leaders, and really leaders in every industry, hire new candidates is that they don’t conduct serious evaluations of their skills until after they make the hire. The way it normally works is that they’ll look at a bunch of resumes, talk to the candidates whose resumes they liked the best, and then, usually, hire the candidate they liked talking to the most.

The issue is that at no point in that process does the team leader really determine the skill level of the candidate. They are basically going off of what the candidate says about themselves. It’s only after hiring the ISA that they learn whether or not that person can actually do the job required of them.

This way of doing things wastes the valuable time and resources of a real estate business. But there’s a better way to do it.

Screen Inside Sales Agents before You Hire

The first step in your hiring process after looking at resumes should be evaluating whether or not the candidate is actually capable of the job you need done. Instead of narrowing down resumes, interviewing, hiring, then screening their performance, the process should go: narrowing down resumes, screening their performance, interviewing them, then deciding whether or not to make the hire.

How do you screen their performance? By evaluating how they talk on the phone with you or another team member. The most important skill a real estate inside sales agent needs to have is to be able to have good conversations with complete strangers and convince them to take an action. If you don’t think someone is very good at speaking on the phone, then they most likely will not be able to accomplish that.

So, before you even move on to the next steps in the interviewing and hiring process, you want to hear how they sound on voicemail, do role plays with them where you present them with various situations or objections, and have the candidate make actual calls to see how they do. Doing this might seem like a lot of work for potential hires, but the alternative is spending far more time and money on an ISA that doesn’t end up working out.

The candidate doesn’t have to be perfect, but you should be convinced that they are at least somewhat good and confident on the phone—to the point where you think you can train them to be better.

What’s the Next Step?

Once you narrow down your resumes and then see which candidates sound good on the phone, the next step is to conduct a formal interview. This step will help you gain a deeper understanding of their experience, skillset, mindset, motivation level, and, generally, what kind of person they are.

If everything checks out, then make the hire.

After hiring, the first next thing you do should be training them. Do role plays, mock calls, and call reviews, and teach them objection handling techniques, sales techniques, etc.

We Have the Tools to Help You Hire, Train, and Keep a Real Estate Inside Sales Agent

The ISA Ascend program at Smart Inside Sales covers everything a real estate team leader needs. It takes you from prepping your business for ISA training and showing you how to promote the position, to how to screen resumes, evaluate candidates, and actually make the hire. Once you hire the best ISA for the job, you’ll also have access to our Conversion University program that includes video courses and live coaching.

Hiring the right ISA can be tough, but it’s impossible. The tools we offer at Smart Inside Sales make it a whole lot easier!