Need Is Not A Hiring Strategy: Recruiting The Right Talent For Your Business

Most business owners do not “decide” to hire, they finally surrender to it. The story usually goes like this: the inbox is out of control, deals are slipping, clients are waiting for updates, marketing is behind, the team is burned out, and someone says the magic words: “I just need a VA” or “I need a TC” or “I need another buyer’s agent.” The need is real. The problem is that need never solves anything on its own. When you hire from need, you are hiring from pain. Pain is a terrible strategist. It makes you impatient, undiscerning, and overly optimistic about people who can fog a mirror and start “right away.” That is how leaders end up hiring someone who fills a seat, but not the role, and then wonder six months later why they feel more trapped than before.

Need is a signal, not a strategy. Feeling stretched, overloaded, or stuck is useful feedback that the current structure of your business has reached its limit. It tells you something needs to change. What it does not tell you is what role to hire, what kind of person belongs in that role, how that person will impact the rest of the team, or whether the business model can actually support them. When you skip those questions and rush to “just get someone in here,” you are not solving a problem, you are moving it. Sometimes you are multiplying it. You would never buy a property based purely on the feeling that you “need more doors.” You would underwrite it. Yet many owners hire based on urgency instead of underwriting the role.

This is where the concept of an avatar matters. Before you post an ad for a VA, transaction coordinator, marketing assistant, buyer’s agent, or showing assistant, you need to define exactly who you are building this role around. An avatar is not a cute exercise in idealism. It is a practical description of the person who will actually thrive in your world. It includes what they are responsible for, how they think, how they communicate, how they handle pressure, and how they respond to coaching. Skills sit on the surface. Your avatar goes deeper into temperament, pace, judgment, energy, and values. I break this down further in why hiring for energy beats hiring for skill alone, where the focus is on hiring people who elevate the room instead of simply checking boxes on a resume. 

If you lead a real estate team, think about the roles you are commonly hiring. A VA needs to be organized, detail focused, and comfortable working asynchronously, but they also need initiative, not just compliance. A transaction coordinator must love structure, documentation, timelines, and clean files, yet also be calm when other people’s chaos shows up in their inbox. A marketing assistant should be creative, but more importantly reliable with deadlines and clear about brand voice. A buyer’s agent or showing assistant needs drive and curiosity, but they also need to genuinely like people and know how to follow a process. Those are different avatars. “I just need help” treats them as interchangeable. Clarity treats each one as a specific, well defined investment that must produce specific results.

Once you define the avatar, you translate it into something you can manage: a simple role scorecard. Instead of a vague job description, you get explicit about the outcomes this person must own. For a TC, that might be percentage of files that close on time, error rate on compliance documents, and how quickly clients get proactive updates. For a VA, it might be inbox response time, task completion rates, and how consistently they maintain your CRM. For a buyer’s agent, it may be signed buyer consultations, offers written, and conversion from appointment to closing. The avatar describes who they are. The scorecard defines what they must deliver. When those two are aligned, you stop hiring out of guilt and start hiring based on whether someone can win in the environment you are actually running.

Then comes the part most people rush: sourcing. If you know the avatar, the question is simple: where does this person already spend their time. For a TC, that might be industry specific Facebook groups, referral networks, or vendors who know strong administrators looking for a shift. For a VA, that might be specialized VA companies focused on real estate, platforms built for remote talent, or your own database of past applicants who were strong but not right for a previous role. For a marketing assistant, your best source might be local colleges, marketing communities, or your own social audience. For buyer’s agents and showing assistants, your best candidates might already be in your ecosystem: ISAs, client care staff, or ambitious individuals in adjacent roles. “Post it everywhere and hope” is lazy recruiting. Targeted sourcing aligned to the avatar is efficient recruiting.

Your job posting should read like it was written for your avatar, not for everyone with a license or admin background. That means less fluff about “fast paced environments” and more clarity about the real demands of the role. If the job requires handling 15 active files without dropping details, say so. If it requires calling internet leads daily and following a proven script, say so. If it means occasionally dealing with emotionally charged clients under tight deadlines, say so. At the same time, speak directly to the person you want: their drive, their desire for structure or growth, their comfort with accountability, their willingness to be coached. The right candidate should feel recognized, not sold. The wrong candidate should quietly deselect themselves.

Screening is where most leaders betray their own avatar. They say they want someone proactive, then hire the first person who can start Monday. They say culture matters, then ignore red flags because “we really need the help.” This is how low performers sneak in and stay longer than they should, eroding standards and slowing everyone down. In the hidden costs of keeping the wrong person too long, I unpack exactly how expensive that avoidance becomes in terms of team trust, burnout, and lost opportunities.  Good screening protects you from that. Use short, focused application questions that force candidates to think. Require a brief video introduction. Give them a small test that mirrors the job: clean up a messy email thread, draft a client update, build a simple checklist, or role play a buyer consultation. You are not looking for perfection. You are looking for patterns: how they think, how they communicate, how they respond to direction.

The interview should validate the avatar, not just confirm skills. Ask about how they like to be managed, what kind of environment burns them out, how they handle conflict with a teammate, and what feedback has been hardest for them to hear in the past. Listen for self awareness and ownership, not performance. For roles that touch your culture heavily, lean into questions about energy: “When you walk into a room, what do you think people experience from you.” That is not a trick. It reveals whether they have ever thought about their impact on others. In alignment before scale in your business model, I talk about why the wrong people, even “talented” ones, can pull your entire operation off course when their values or energy do not match where you are going.  Hiring is not about filling capacity, it is about protecting alignment.

Different roles require different recruiting sources, but the principle does not change. For a VA, you might lean heavily on specialized agencies, but you still filter those candidates through your avatar and scorecard. For a TC, you might prioritize referrals from agents and brokers who value precision and service. For a marketing assistant, portfolio and samples matter more than generic claims of being “creative.” For a buyer’s agent, your best source is often your own database, events, or community presence, where people already resonate with how you work. Wherever you look, remember that the best hires rarely come from random job boards alone. They usually come from ecosystems where your avatar is already learning, working, or serving.

There is also a timing component leaders do not like to admit. If you only recruit when you “need someone yesterday,” you will always compromise. The best leaders recruit consistently, even when they are not desperate. They build benches of talent, stay in conversation with potential future hires, and keep a light version of their hiring funnel running at all times. That way, when a seat opens or they are ready to grow, they do not start from zero. This is the same mindset I use in tailored coaching for effective sales team development, where building a strong team is treated as an ongoing system, not a one time event.  Your hiring process should exist on paper and in practice long before you post your next job.

Things to ask your coach when you are in a hiring season: Ask, “Am I hiring from vision or from panic, and what evidence do I have.” Ask, “Do I actually have a clear avatar and scorecard for this role, or am I trying to outsource my confusion to another human.” Ask, “Where in my business model is this role creating leverage, and how will we know if it is working at 90 days and 12 months.” Ask, “What patterns do you see in my past hires, and where do I tend to compromise or avoid hard decisions.” Ask, “Where should I be sourcing this avatar given my niche, brand, and culture.” Ask, “What questions or tests will best reveal energy, alignment, and coachability for this role, not just technical skill.” Then ask, “If this person fails, what about my system made that outcome likely.” These are uncomfortable questions. They are also the questions that prevent you from reliving the same hiring mistakes year after year.

The real shift is simple. Stop asking, “How fast can I get someone in this seat,” and start asking, “What kind of person does this business deserve, and what structure do I need to have in place before they walk in.” Hiring the right VA, TC, marketing assistant, buyer’s agent, or showing assistant will absolutely change your capacity. But only if you treat it as leadership work, not relief seeking. When you build a clear avatar, design a clean scorecard, source from the right pools, and refuse to compromise during screening, you start stacking the deck in your favor. You stop gambling on people. You start building a real team. Coaching can accelerate that by giving you outside perspective, accountability, and a framework you can reuse. But even before you jump into your next session, you can make one powerful decision: you will never again hire purely from need.