- Agencies have for too long hired by number, looking to fill empty desks.
- Recruiting and talent assessment is a billion-dollar industry for a reason.
- Finding the right team for an agency can be as valuable as a year's worth of listings.
Have suggestions for products that you’d like to see reviewed by our real estate technology expert? Email Craig Rowe.
The pitch
Echovate is team-building, hiring and staff-performance analysis software.
Platform: Browser-based, device responsive.
Ideal for: Any size agency seeking ways to improve recruiting and build productive, team-oriented companies.
Top selling points
- Using Echovate to build your agent team could lead to fast market expansion.
- Quickly creates a smarter, data-driven recruiting process.
- Avoid repeating hiring mistakes.
Things to consider
This is not software for real estate brokerages that volume hire or maintain a structure where 10 percent of agents produce 90 percent of the revenue.
The close
Echovate is all about data. And we know how important data is to real estate.
Echovate doesn’t leverage listing data or website traffic. It’s about linking personal and professional habits to agents’ sales performance, active and historical.
Echovate is essentially staffing software. It uses a carefully designed personality analysis conducted in about 10 minutes via an easy Web-based survey to determine how job candidates will fit into your company.
The software assigns a ranking to a wide array of professional and personal attributes, eventually assembling a behavioral fingerprint for each candidate.
Hiring brokers then compare a prospective agent’s profile against other applicants’ and rank them against current members of their company.
The goal isn’t to create a team of like personalities.
Instead, it’s geared to fill in work performance and attribute gaps to ensure your entire team is ideally balanced for consistent success.
For example, it’s good to have some people who are assertive, vocal and not concerned with details (like me) working alongside those who may be introverted but very deliberate in how they manage transactions.
Echovate ranks applicants based on attributes like “competitive,” “self-discipline,” “persuasive,” “leadership,” “flexibility,” “systematic” and “orderliness,” among others.
The software is very explanatory, offering lengthy narrative descriptions of how each attribute applies to a candidate.
Hiring brokers can compare and contrast rankings and also juxtapose those rankings with individual agent performance in the market.
Echovate can manually — and, soon, automatically via MLS partnerships — integrate an agent’s actual sales history.
As Echovate grows, it will be able to compare a candidate’s performance metrics and attribute rankings with agents across its entire national user base. All data will be anonymized.
(Echovate’s developers are anxiously awaiting the onset of Upstream.)
The process will present an anonymous, but actual, agent’s transaction resume alongside their Echovate attribute profile.
Brokers can then benchmark a 100-transaction-per-year agent against a prospective candidate.
Echovate’s team building functionality is expanding with a soon-to-be-released feature that allows for a broker to “clone” a team.
This is a Fortune 500-type hiring software, one that progressive (hybrid?) agencies would be smart to emulate.
It doesn’t actually replicate the exact profiles of each member, but instead finds the profiles that are most compatible with the new team’s base members, using the original team’s numbers as a basis.
When a prospective agent applies for a sales position, their Echovate profile is also linked directly to their LinkedIn account, as is their basic contact information.
Nonhires can be maintained in the system to be “watched” in case their Echovate ranking becomes an ideal match for a new team being formed.
Like I said, it’s all about data.
However, all that intimate data is hidden behind a straightforward, ergonomic interface. The system is highly intuitive and won’t require a human resources professional to operate.
Conceptually, though, Echovate is highly sophisticated.
This is a Fortune 500-type hiring software, one that progressive (hybrid?) agencies would be smart to emulate.
Have you made some agent hiring mistakes?
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
