How a 400-Agent Team Recruits Without Cold Calling with Jaclyn Barker | Ep 117
Real Estate Team OS
Retention Equals Net Agent Count
Jaclyn argues retention matters as much as recruiting and warns against focusing solely on gross hires.
After nearly 25 in real estate sales, Jaclyn Barker found her next right fit, joining Tiffany Williamson at Navigate Realty as a full-time recruiter.
Over the past few years, Navigate has grown from roughly 80 agents across two North Carolina markets to approximately 400 agents in seven active locations, with Tennessee getting ready to launch. In Raleigh alone, the team is bringing in 15 to 20 new agents a month.
None of this growth came through cold calls, robo-calls, or robo-texts. As Jaclyn says in this conversation, “I despise cold calling … it’s just not my thing.”
Watch or listen to have Jaclyn walk you through the philosophy, process, and system behind this growth.
Learn why she treats recruiting exactly the way a great agent treats a client relationship, why she insists on in-person interviews of at least an hour with every candidate, and why she'll sometimes tell someone they're not ready to make the jump yet.
Find out what it looks like to build a recruiting function from scratch, when to make your first recruiting hire, and why retention is the half of the equation most teams ignore.
Watch or listen for Jaclyn's insights into:
0:00 Intro and welcome
2:25 How drive shows up early in a recruiting conversation if you know what to look for
3:38 Why recruiting and real estate sales are the same kind of people business, built on discovery and fit rather than pitching
5:33 How a long career in real estate, a difficult market, and one conversation with Tiffany Williamson led to a full-time recruiting role
10:30 What Navigate Realty looked like when she joined versus what it looks like today
12:36 The interview that shaped her entire approach, and what she decided she would never do to a candidate
18:06 Why net agent count is the only number that matters, and what it means for how you think about retention
20:53 How the recruiting function has scaled alongside Navigate's growth, and what triggered each new hire
23:28 Why she spends at least an hour with every candidate and what that kind of time in the room actually reveals
25:47 What an ATS is, why you need one, and how they selected their applicant tracking system (ATS!)
27:51 The recruiting process from first contact to offer, and why in-person interviews are non-negotiable
33:30 “I despise cold calling” - why building something worth joining eventually becomes your most powerful recruiting tool
38:15 When to hire a full-time in-house recruiter, and the investment logic that makes it worth it
40:50 Why being honest with candidates about how hard real estate is makes her better at recruiting, not worse
46:41 At the end, Jaclyn reveals how a frugal instinct went sideways, when her Apple Watch triggers, and why true crime podcasts share equal car time with real estate podcasts.
Related episodes:
→ 90-Minute Recruiting Workshop (sign up free for all the subscriber-only episodes)
→ When, Why, and How to Build Your Recruiting Department with Tiffany Williamson
Connect with Jaclyn Barker and Navigate Realty:
→ https://navigaterealty.com/join/
Connect with Real Estate Team OS:
→ https://www.realestateteamos.com
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