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Maya Saric, Hitting the recruitment target with psychology


Maya Saric, Hitting the recruitment target with psychology

The Real Estate industry churns through people at a merciless rate of knots. It’s a tough gig and the skills that a person needs to succeed combine unique skill sets.

To make it as a listing agent for example it is necessary to have particular diametrically opposed qualities. On the one hand you need to be persistent in making one cold call after the other and then you need to turn on the charm for a vendor and be a master problem solver.

Psychologist Maya Saric from Corporate Coach and its subsidiary, Sales Industry Profile (SIP), has specialised in sales recruitment for many years. She says, “The people that suit being a listing agent are extraordinarily unique. Listing agents need to have this persistent, relentless, boring tolerance of prospecting, and do it consistently, day in and day out for the rest of their lives. And then on the other hand, when they meet the vendor, they need to be adaptive, agile, sophisticated, be able to handle other people’s emotions and manage an incredibly sophisticated transaction in the middle of a very complicated family environment.”

She continues, “So, these people who’ve spent four hours of the day sitting at their phone, being bored to tears prospecting, suddenly need this extraordinarily different set of attributes to manage - at a level of incredible sophistication - the emotional issues of people’s biggest life transaction.”

To help agency owners and principals find staff with these specialised qualities Maya, utilising her psychological and sales background, uses a piece of software - Sales Inventory Profile or SIP for short - that identifies people with the right attributes for selling.

Developed by Maya and her team, SIP is a sales IQ system that determines which individuals have the inherent capacity to sell. SIP was designed based on research of high performance sales staff to assist an individual’s own assessment of their potential for a career in sales and employers needing to hire sales staff.

Maya says, “What the software actually does is identify in a candidate how many they have of the 75 attributes that our original research showed that high performing Real Estate agents possessed.” This approach Maya says, has “been astronomically successful. We’ve had a more than 70 per cent retention rate of staff over a two-year period. And we’ve had some people who’ve been in their jobs for four and five years, who’ve grown from joining a business on reception or in a sales support role, and going on to becoming million dollar listing agents.”

When Maya and her team work with clients, they investigate the office situation, develop a clear understanding of what type of business it is, including analysing the leader or the management team. They write compelling, emotionally engaging, targeted copy for an advertisement to attract the right candidate. Once candidates apply, their application is screened by SIP software.

Maya explains that her process finds candidates who have the raw material to be extraordinary. “We know that certain levels of those attributes (of high performing real estate agents) are required for certain jobs. And even within the score range, there are combinations of patterns that are different. So you could have someone score at 75 per cent for example, which could effectively make them either a buyers’ agent, a commercial agent, or a particular style of property manager.”

The principal is responsible for reference checking and making the job offer. Maya says, “We’ve never met the candidate and we have no relationship with them. So we don’t contaminate them for that reason. We don’t persuade them, or confuse them either way about the job. So it’s a 100 per cent one on one connection.”

Once the right candidate has been selected, Maya advises hitting the ground running. She says, “So we’re talking about people who have the raw material, and they really just need a little bit of water and sunshine, and the quicker we give them that water and sunshine - it seems so simple - the quicker you’ll get that result.”

She advises her clients to get candidates immersed in the office culture as soon as possible. She says, “It’s really important to have a clear road map before they start, including training as quickly as possible. That first level of training has got to be from the principal, with a preparation of ‘So this is our market; this is how we target them; this is where we think our strengths are’, followed by classic sales training so that this person has a clear understanding of what it is they’re trying to do, so that their skills flourish as quickly as possible.”

SIP is a sales IQ system that determines which individuals have the inherent capacity to sell.

In her experience, Maya has noticed that, “People have waited two, three, four months to see if they’re going to be okay. And you’re wasting three or four months of salary, because nobody can do it properly without skill, no matter how much intuitive ability they have. And, you know, they can follow you around forever, but if they don’t have the clarity about ‘Why do you do that’, and ‘Why did you say that?’ and ‘Why didn’t we go here?’… Unless they have a clarity about that, they can’t build on that very quickly. So you’re prolonging the event, or prolonging the start up phase. And I’ve seen candidates who come in through our process and make $500,000 or $600,000 in their first year, because from day one, they had a script; they had clarity about their product; they had a procedure; they had KPIs; they had sales meetings; they were off to sales training, it was all systems go immediately.”

If you would like to know more about SIP please see:

www salesinventoryprofile.com or contact Maya on 0407005290.


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Maya Saric, Hitting the recruitment target with psychology