RECRUITMENT
Kissing frogs to find a prince W
Andrea Kirkby asks just how hard is recruitment in estate agency? Many experienced agents left the
ith unemployment increasing to 7.9 per cent this June, according to the Office for National Statistics, you’d think it
wouldn’t be too difficult to recruit good estate agents. Well, you can think again, according to most recruiters. Many candidates nowadays only want to
work for the top firms; Anthony Hesse of Property Professionals says, “It’s a bit like Man United and Barcelona, all the best people want to play for those clubs. Even Knight Frank and Savills sometimes struggle to find the right people, particularly when looking for particular skill sets such as property management”. (Both have retained his firm.) Andrew Deverell Smith, of Deverell
Smith Recruitment, concurs. “It’s incredibly difficult to get the right people. The candidate controls the situation in my view. If you’re not in the top ten, those people don’t necessarily want to work for you.”
industry after being made redundant in the dog days of 2008-9 and this has created a problem for firms looking to recruit. Anthony Hesse says those who have left the industry have stayed out, and there have been few new trainees coming in. Yet the most common request his firm gets is for people with 12 to 18 months experience; “12 to 18 months ago, no one was recruiting,” he says. “Because firms can’t find those people, they’re hiring trainees.” Portia Oliver at AMR agrees: “The more experienced people are being looked after by their current employer, this makes them very reluctant to look anywhere else and make the move. We have a number of opportunities for really strong, sales people but candidates feel they are more vulnerable to move now, the old saying ‘First in, First out’ frightens them”. The use of recruitment agencies is
common in the sector, as estate agents realise they need to broaden their
recruitment drive to attract the right candidates, but it’s not the agents’ only port of call. Martin Wood, of Prima Ardelle, says “the larger and more progressive companies are using their own advertising and resources as well as agencies. It doesn’t matter where the candidate comes from as long as they fit the company.” At Douglas & Gordon, many hires come
from recommendation or through their website, and the firm is now adding the LinkedIn social network to its recruitment channels. The firm’s £1,000 bonus staff referral scheme works particularly well. But the firm also uses recruitment
agents. “We are pretty selective about who we use,” their HR head Gilly Westwell says, “there are so many out there; very few understand exactly what we’re looking for.” She finds that agencies tend to be more useful for secretarial and admin staff, and for property management; negotiators, on the other hand, tend to come through referral, or direct.
PROPERTYdrum OCTOBER 2011 21
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