Recruitment Experiences of Clark Estate Agents – Employing in today’s New Norm.
The employment landscape has changed and so has staffing, recruitment and hiring.
As such, it is imperative for business owners to keep up and adapt. That’s because people are such an important part of everyday operations.
In an ideal world, a business forms a team and this team unites to lead the business to ongoing success. However, as much as we want people to stay forever, business owners must acknowledge that the people who power our organisations eventually leave at some point, for whatever reason.
When this happens, a business has to fill this gap – and this is where the challenge lies.
Let’s hear from Australian business owners directly
To understand how businesses are responding to changes in the employment landscape, we are interviewing business owners and asking them to share real experiences that will help us understand how employment and recruitment work today.
First up: the Sydney real estate agency that inspired the development of MPLOI: Clark Estate Agents.
Read on to hear their story.
How important are employees?
For businesses of all sizes and across all industries, a reliable team is an essential requirement. Stability is not just important to optimise operations; it also helps your customers feel that you are a team they can trust.
“A reliable team is the crux of our business,” Clark Estate Agents Principal Director, Brendon Clark says, “because in real estate, we are dealing with people’s most valuable assets – their homes – so it’s important to build trust with the right people.”
In a customer-orientated business like Clark Estate Agents, building the right team and having passionate people who are both sympathetic to client needs and are aligned with the business’ vision are crucial to success.
But hiring those “right people” today can be a challenge
The job market today is tough for businesses. This 2022, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that 26.7% of businesses in Australia have vacancies, showing a dramatic increase from the 6.5% record in 2020 at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic.
The trend can also be observed specifically in the real estate industry, with 27.3% of Australian real estate agencies reporting vacancies in 2022, as compared to the 11.8% recorded in 2021.
“You can’t keep people forever,” Clark Estate Agents Sales Director, Diana Clark says. “That is why it’s called hiring. Eventually, you must give them back to the employment pool. However long you have them for, you just have to be grateful for that.”
“Working for 5-10 years in a business is rare nowadays,” Brendon adds. “Because today’s generation of employees want to move around a lot and absorb as much information as they can from different businesses. They see it as a healthy thing – having a lengthy list of jobs on their resumes.”
This observation holds true for businesses across Australia, with 34% of employees staying for 1-4 years in a business and another 21.2% staying for less than a year. While this is an ongoing trend, it still proves to be a challenge for most businesses where employee retention is crucial to success.
The business cost of losing employees
One thing that most business owners understand is the need to fill so many roles and wear so many hats. Most are involved in doing taxes and accounting, handling current business, sales, and marketing, among others.
As a business owner, when you are doing these things on your own, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you already have your team right.
“You think: I’ve got my team set now, everything’s fine.” Brendon shares, “then we lose sight of the fact that one day, one of them may leave, find a better job, move to a different state, have a family. These are all these issues that we cannot control.”
“When this happens, we all go into reactive mode,” Diana adds. “It’s also us business owners who jump in to temporarily fill the roles that are left vacant. This then increases stress levels, which takes a toll on the business. And it’s costly to hire, advertise and market for new team members.”
The solution: a new employment approach for the new norm
“It took me a long time to realise the importance of communicating with people within your industry who might be the right fit for your business in the near future,” Brendon says.
This is a technique called proactive recruitment.
“If you think about it, having online connections is how people meet today. In business, personal relationships and networking, this is where we are going. The employment industry is probably the last one to go in that direction.”
This is how the MPLOI recruitment app came to be.
“I was always in a reactive hiring state. When someone resigned, I prepared a job ad, placed it on a job posting board and launched some costly ads. Then it would take weeks to find someone. We would then have to pay recruiter fees and the advertising fees only to realise that the person we found was not the right fit,” he adds.
MPLOI was born from actual fundamental business owner struggles and it took years of research and understanding to realise and conceptualise a recruitment solution that would allow business owners to proactively connect with potential employees.
“We’re excited for MPLOI because it allows us to adapt to the changing needs of the new workforce generation. It allows us to be more recruitment proactive instead of reactive when filling vacancies,” Brendon and Diana share. “Now we’re building an ongoing healthy culture and we’re not just excited for ourselves – we’re excited for candidates, for our fellow business owners and we’re excited that we can reduce the stress and recruitment costs for businesses like ours.”
What is MPLOI?
MPLOI is an innovative employment app that matches like-minded employers and potential employees based on similar values, qualities and skills through a career alignment algorithm.
With MPLOI’s modern approach to proactive recruitment, we empower job seekers and business owners to forge genuine connections so businesses can build a team with people who want to be there instead of those who just have to be there.
This recruitment platform gives you instant access to a plethora of potential employees, offering the ultimate stress-free recruitment solution for business owners like you.
Register your interest below and get notified of our upcoming launch! Here MPLOI