How to run a real estate recruitment campaign, digitally

Are you a real estate agency owner needing new staff – sales or other roles? What are the tips and tricks for attracting great talent to your team, using social media and other online marketing strategies?

Today’s advice applies to real estate franchise owners, office owners and lone real estate agents running a highly successful team. Whatever your situation, clients often ask me to help them extend their real estate recruitment campaigns across social and digital media.

So, here are my learnings on how to blitz the real estate job market and find the best property professionals quickly and seamlessly.

Popular times for real estate recruitment

Finding new staff can be time-consuming and expensive, but with a well-planned real estate recruitment campaign, you can reach a large pool of quality candidates with minimal stress and cost.

In Australia and New Zealand, the December and January months are a popular time for sales agents to jump ship and look for a new position within a competing real estate brand. Staff in property management or operational roles may leave your real estate agency anytime. But, for real estate sales or buyers agents, their commission is a key factor when they leave. They often time their transition when they have no property listings on the go – making Christmas time the peak period for real estate recruitment campaigns.

Using social media for real estate recruitment

The use of social media campaigns in job adverts is a growing recruitment trend. According to the Australian Government, social media is third place behind job boards, word of mouth, and ahead of appointing a recruiter. The survey reported that social media marketing was used by 24% of recruiting employers in 2021, up from 19% in 2020.

If you have social media pages for your real estate business, there is no doubt that at some point in the past, you’ve done a ‘we are hiring’ post to complement more traditional recruiting methods.

Remember that an organic post is different from a paid social media campaign. An organic post will only be seen by a handful of people, whereas a paid advertisement can reach thousands of potential candidates.

A paid social media campaign can target people based on their job titles or the industry in which they work. Social media platforms are a great way to target a large pool of property professionals, reach passive job seekers and, as a bonus, gain social media referrals (as people will reshare or tag a friend in your post).

First let’s explore the two most popular social platforms from a recruitment perspective, namely LinkedIn and Facebook.

Recruiting real estate staff on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media platform built for professional networking. Its user profiles are categorised by industry, job classification and location, making it the best social media platform for real estate recruitment campaigns.

Owned by Microsoft, LinkedIn has come a long way in recent years, enhancing its features to be on an equal footing with competing social media sites. It is far more than just a place to house your resume. LinkedIn includes social media feeds, company pages, interest groups, online training, job boards and a paid advertising platform.

LinkedIn allows users to connect and network with their peers, making it the best social media platform to find real estate professionals. LinkedIn has a user base of 159,000 people with real estate experience in Australia and 30,000 people with real estate experience in New Zealand.

There are a few different ways to use LinkedIn for real estate recruitment;

• LinkedIn company page: If recruitment is a regular activity in your real estate franchise or business, use LinkedIn company pages to build your brand story and post regular insights that showcase working under your banner in a positive light. Remember that the reasons for joining your real estate business differ for licensed professionals versus support staff.
• Free 30-day LinkedIn job board post: Use LinkedIn’s free job post to share a job opening on your company page. This free job post will reach your followers and appear on the LinkedIn job board for 30 days. The downside is that you can only have one free job post at a time. Follow this LinkedIn Quality Job Posts Guideline to create a powerful job advertisement.
• Paid LinkedIn job board post: You can also reach more candidates by upgrading your LinkedIn job posts to paid ones. According to LinkedIn, you’ll get 3x the interest from qualified applicants. LinkedIn will identify people on the platform who are a good match and notify them that the role is available.
• Brand campaigns on LinkedIn: Another option is to run a marketing campaign using the LinkedIn Campaign Manager ad platform to target property professionals that might not be actively searching for a job. You can use your campaign to persuade people that you offer better financial incentives and a work-life balance.
• Setting your LinkedIn ad budget: When you create your job post or advertising campaign, LinkedIn will recommend a minimum daily spend based on the job title, location, and the number of competing advertisers. Typically, you’ll need to spend at least $20+ a day. But ultimately, you get the final say in your budget.
• LinkedIn executive search: Another way to use LinkedIn for real estate recruitment is to search for potential candidates on the LinkedIn platform yourself. You can use the LinkedIn search function to drill down to people in your location with real estate in their profiles, review their experience and then reach out to them directly to discuss your job opportunity. You can upgrade to a LinkedIn premium account to search, connect or send InMails (emails through LinkedIn).
• LinkedIn groups: You can reach out to potential candidates by posting your job opportunities in real estate groups. There are currently 237 LinkedIn groups for “real estate Australia” and 50 for “real estate New Zealand”. Just be mindful that some of these groups are property investor skewed, so the best groups will be those that are for real estate professionals only.

In addition to giving you a place to promote your real estate jobs, LinkedIn has some valuable tools to help you manage the real estate recruitment process. For example, as applications for your job posting come in, you can filter, sort, and rate candidates, or you can set criteria, so those applications that aren’t a match receive a notification that they’ve been unsuccessful.

Recruiting real estate staff on Facebook

Although LinkedIn was built with recruitment specifically in mind, Facebook offers something that no other social media platform can: the highest visibility. With over 21 million Australians using Facebook each month, who spend on average of 40 minutes a day on the platform, the chances that a prospective candidate will see your real estate job are higher on Facebook than any other social media platform.

• Facebook business page: In the same way we talked about promoting your job openings via your company page on LinkedIn, you can do the same with your Facebook business page. It’s a great way for people from the local community to see that you are in the market for new hires. And, as real estate agents tend to work near where they live and closely follow their competitor’s Facebook pages, it could be a great way to get prospective property professionals to come out of the woodwork and contact you.
• Facebook job post: You may or may not be aware that Facebook had a Jobs Marketplace that allowed you to post jobs. Facebook’s job feature never became quite as sophisticated as LinkedIn’s. And currently it is only available to people in the USA and Canada, but hopefully we will see a new and improved version return in the future.
• Facebook organic post: An organic post on your Facebook page or user profile will cost you nothing, but it won’t reach many people either, and it will damage the overall paid ads reach for your account. My advice is to only post organic posts to your user profile (as you can’t run ads there) and apply an ad budget to your post on your page.
• Paid Facebook recruitment campaign: A paid Facebook campaign is best to promote your real estate job to property professionals nearby using Facebook Ads Manager. You can leave the ad audience broad and focus on the distance from your office that you’d expect people to be willing to travel – but this might open you up to applicants who are not from the property industry. Alternatively, filter the ad audience to target property professionals. Search for “property” and/or “real estate” and select the options classified as “industry” rather than “interests”. Expect to pay at least $10 a day minimum ad budget. The more you spend, the more people you reach and the greater your chance of finding the right real estate candidate.
• Facebook groups: Another great way to find new real estate staff is by posting in Facebook Groups. There are groups for local communities, job seekers by location and groups for real estate professionals that you can utilise. You can also ask people within your network or who live in your neighbourhood to share your Facebook post with their connections. It’s often a small world!

Recruiting real estate staff on job sites

Online job boards or job sites are still the most commonly used way to find staff today. More than half of Australian employers that are recruiting (56%) used this method in 2021. This number is even higher in the major cities.

No job sites or boards focus purely on real estate professions (that we can find), but there are general job sites where all types of jobs are listed. The most popular sites in Australia are Indeed.com and Seek.com.au / Seek.co.nz.

Using an example search for “real estate sales” in Sydney in December, Indeed had over 400 job listings, Seek had approx 250 job listings, and LinkedIn had 85 results. The best approach would be to conduct similar searches for your region and list your job ad on the most popular site.

But fear not; wherever you list your real estate job, Jora.com, another job site, scrapes multiple recruitment and recruiter websites to create a comprehensive list of candidates. I suspect that’s where most people would hang out!

Job boards are candidate-focused and user-friendly, allowing applicants to complete the process quickly using simple tabs and buttons. As a result, they can deliver a high number of applications, but we see a shift away from this method to the use of social media campaigns for real estate recruitment ads.

Add a careers section to your real estate website

If your real estate business offers franchise opportunities or is large enough to recruit staff regularly, you should add a careers section to your website. It’s a great way to receive applications year-round from people keen to work for you and helps present your real estate brand as an employer of choice.

A careers page is a section of your website dedicated to recruitment and includes information about your business’s values, culture and career paths within your organisation. It also details real estate jobs you currently have open. Prospective candidates can use the information on your careers page to assess whether or not they want to hit the “Apply Now” button.

Other benefits of having your own careers page on your real estate website include the following;

• Google searches from real estate professionals searching terms like ‘real estate jobs in [suburb]’ will be directed to your website.
• It helps you build a database of candidates looking to work with you by encouraging them to register their details even if a suitable job opportunity is not available at the current time.
• Allows you to run social media and ad recruitment campaigns with a landing page for job applications.
• It enables you to run retargeting campaigns for job seekers that have visited your careers page in the past.
• Over time your career pages should help to reduce your cost of hiring staff.

Your website provider can help you add a careers page to your real estate website. But, if you need to fill multiple positions regularly, consider incorporating a job management application like Jobadder.com to streamline the process with automation.

Getting help with real estate recruitment advertising

While recruiting new staff may seem daunting, with a talent acquisition strategy that includes social media advertising in place, it doesn’t have to be the headache it once was.

If you would like help with digital strategies for recruiting staff for your real estate business, you can organise a free 1-hour consultation with me. Go ahead; take a step in the right direction today!

Written by Melanie Hoole

My team and I specialise in helping real estate and property professionals perfect their personal brand, build a first-class digital profile and implement inbound marketing activities to attract leads. If you are unsure which direction to take with your digital marketing contact me for help.