David Leyshon, writes in Recruitment Consultant, Dec 2008
With the ongoing credit crisis and ensuing slump in house prices, estate agents may be forgiven for thinking that their career prospects are looking anything but healthy. But according to David Leyshon, Managing Director of engineering and technical recruitment consultancy, CBSbutler, they could find themselves in high demand within the recruitment sector.
Pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV, listen to the radio - two things dominate the economic landscape at the moment - rising unemployment - and falling house prices. However, there are some sectors that, despite the media’s obsession with bad news, are still candidate short and these hiring markets are still very buoyant - including our own area - the sourcing of engineering and technical professionals. With a shortage of skill sets in niche areas, more employers are now seeking talent globally and need professional consultancies like ourselves to help. But trying to attract new recruitment talent into our industry to support these candidate short markets has proved difficult. Many of the good recruiters are staying put where they are and understandably value job security over a career move.
While historically there has always been some migration from other sales areas such as estate agency into recruitment, the current housing market means that there is now much more of a potential candidate pool to fish from. There are obvious parallels - sales negotiators and managers from an estate agency background have ideal transferable skill sets: customer service and communication, sales ability, teamwork, persuasion, negotiation and drive - all attributes needed by the successful recruitment consultant.
Estate Agency can equip potential consultants with a number of practical skills which can be applied in a recruitment career – the ability to build long term relationships with clients over the phone and in person, sales negotiation techniques with vendors and potential purchasers and a commitment to excellent customer service. These are all skills which are invaluable in recruitment. Moving house and changing jobs are probably two of the most stressful events for a person to go through and having an appreciation and empathy towards individuals can make a real difference to success.
Obviously, as with any new recruit one has to be selective and we’re all too aware that estate agency has had the reputation of attracting its fair share of what we might term less scrupulous operators. However many of the large estate agency chains have established highly professional training schemes in recent years and graduates of these programmes are some of the best sales people that I have seen in my career. Estate agency - like recruitment- has had its critics but those who have been successful could well have their skills honed to become a strong recruiter.
The benefit of a move quite apart from the obvious disastrous property market at the moment is that lead times are quicker and the potential for fall out, although still present, is a lot less. There is also less weekend and evening working and, particularly in professional and managerial recruitment where fees are often much larger than the average house sale charge, earnings can be significantly higher.
We’ve recently been actively marketing within the estate agency market in order to attract new talent. What I have noticed is that good estate agents - apart from consistently over delivering on sales targets - will typically have relationship building, influencing and negotiation skills that are far stronger than other trainees coming into the sector.
Take Peter, for example, who joined us a couple of months ago after a career in estate agency spanning eleven years. He decided to move into recruitment mainly because he realised that his sales skills would be directly transferable, and with a young family to support, he felt that both the earnings and career development potential would be better. He’s doing well - and has all the attributes I look for - a willingness to go the extra mile, strong influencing and persuading ability and an ability to efficiently manage existing and potential sales activity. He’s going through our intensive induction training at the moment and is showing all the signs of becoming an excellent recruiter.
The slump in property prices shows no signs of abating - but that might just give the recruitment sector a golden opportunity to secure some fresh raw talent.
