Are you struggling to hire back office talent?
Your agents are essential to growing your brokerage. However, even the best agents need back office staff to help handle transactions, expedite commissions, and take care of other administrative tasks. Without back office staff, your agents would have to spend hours managing every transaction – leaving them little time to work with clients.
Despite how crucial back office administrators are, it’s becoming harder to find quality team members. Instead of hiring transaction coordinators and other back office staff in weeks, it can take months to find the right person for the job.
With the national labor shortage impacting your back office, what can you do to keep your back office running smoothly? That’s what we’ll cover in this post. Before we dive into strategies to overcome hiring struggles, let’s take a look at what’s causing the back office staff shortage.
Due to the pandemic, many industries (like construction and technology) are facing labor shortages and more workers leaving their jobs. In terms of agents, residential real estate hasn’t had the same issues. Instead, there’s been an influx of new agents looking to cash in on a hot housing market.
While the number of agents is growing, fewer people want to work in the back office. Top reasons for not wanting to work in the back office include a lack of flexibility, a desire to work remotely, and low pay for the amount of work required.
With many back office workers choosing to leave the field altogether, it’s increasingly difficult to find qualified staff for your back office.
To combat the back office staff shortage, you can either make your brokerage more attractive to back office staff or reduce the number of staff needed to manage your back office (or both). Here are our top tips to help you overcome the staff shortage:
One way to find more qualified back office candidates is to make your brokerage more attractive to top talent.
Back office staff want more job flexibility and the ability to work remotely. If you use traditional methods (like local spreadsheets or paper files) to manage your back office, your staff needs to be at the office to do their job. This in-office requirement can make it harder to find quality back office team members.
Instead of requiring back office staff to be in your office, you should use cloud-based back office software. With everything on the cloud, your back office staff can access everything they need to do their jobs from anywhere. Central document storage also makes it easy for your back office staff to find any document on any computer or smart device.
With the right back office software, you can offer back office staff greater flexibility. This can help differentiate you from other brokerages and help you hire top talent quickly.
Another reason back office talent can be hard to find is that pay doesn’t match up to the amount of work required.
One way to fix this is to increase pay. While that’s always an option, you can also reduce the workload to better align pay and work required. Traditional back office management requires team members to handle tedious tasks like data entry, searching for documents, calculations, and more.
While these tedious tasks aren’t difficult, they’re time-consuming and unenjoyable. Handling so many menial tasks can make back office staff feel like their workload is too large. So, top talent will leave, and finding new talent will be harder.
To reduce your back office workload and make the job more enjoyable, you should use back office software with automation. This software can automatically handle tedious tasks (like data entry or commission calculations). As such, your back office staff won’t have to handle as many repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
A reduced workload can make your current back office staff happier. And, the right automation tools can make your brokerage more attractive for back office talent.
Even after making your brokerage more attractive to back office candidates, you might still struggle to find the right people to hire. Another way to get around the back office staffing shortage is to reduce your back office staff needs.
Manually managing your back office is inefficient and time-consuming. Your back office team members have to manually find data, move it between different systems (like transaction management and accounting), analyze data, create reports, and more.
This manual management wastes hours of your team’s time each week. Spending so much time on tedious tasks means your team can’t get as much done. So, you need more team members to get accomplish everything.
With the right back office software, you can increase back office efficiency to reduce your staff needs. Back office software can automate tasks like data entry and analysis, creating reports, and more. Plus, this software can streamline your back office workflow with an intuitive interface, easy-to-understand dashboards, central document storage, and cloud-based architecture.
With automation and a streamlined workflow, your back office team can get more done every day. So, you need fewer team members to handle the same transaction volume. As such, you won’t have to hire for as many positions. And, if any of your current team leaves, your remaining team will be able to pick up the workload easier – eliminating the need for much hiring.
Another way to reduce your back office hiring needs is to consolidate your real estate tech stack.
If your brokerage doesn’t have a consolidated tech stack, you have a separate solution to manage every aspect of your back office – like transaction management, commission calculation, accounting, agent management, and reporting/analytics.
Your back office team has to learn to use all of these different systems, which can be a time suck. Plus, your team has to manually transfer data between systems and search multiple systems to find required documents – both of which are time-consuming. With so much time spent managing your large tech stack, your back office team has less time to manage transactions.
By consolidating your back office tech into a complete back office platform, you can free up your team to do more each day. Instead of wasting time on data transfer, hunting for documents, and navigating multiple interfaces, your team can do everything in one place – saving hours each week.
With the time saved, your back office staff can manage more transactions and handle more back office tasks. As such, you need less back office staff to meet your needs – reducing the amount of hiring you need to do. This not only saves you time and frustration during the hiring process but can also reduce staffing expenses.
The national labor shortage is impacting every industry – including residential real estate. Finding great back office talent is becoming increasingly more difficult. Struggling to hire can leave you short-staffed and unable to manage your transactions quickly and on time – resulting in a negative client experience.
One way to combat the back office staffing shortage is to make your brokerage more attractive to candidates. You can do this by increasing flexibility and reducing the workload with back office software.
Another option to handle the staffing shortage is to reduce your back office staff needs. You can do this by increasing efficiency and consolidating your tech stack with the right back office platform. This option also helps you reduce staffing expenses – making your brokerage more profitable.
Looking for the right back office software to help you beat the back office staff shortage? Consider Brokermint.
Brokermint’s complete, cloud-based platform has everything you need to increase efficiency, provide flexibility, and reduce your back office workload. Plus, with five modules (transaction management, commission automation, accounting, agent management, and analytics and reporting), Brokermint can help you consolidate your back office tech stack.
Sign up for your Brokermint demo today to see how Brokermint can help you attract top talent and get more done with less staff.
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