Job post face off: Real estate firms

Buying a home is an exhausting process, and you really want a great real estate agent on your side. You need someone to help sniff out a good deal, pick the right offer price, even a shoulder to cry on if you are heartbroken by not getting the home of your dreams (don’t worry, you’ll get the next one!) If ever there was a people-based industry, it’s real estate. That’s why it’s critical that real estate firms hire the best people.

We looked up some of the biggest U.S. real estate firms in the Textio Index to see how they are faring on that front, and here’s what the data shows:

Keller Williams is way out in front even with a middling score of 50. The rest of the pack is clustered down in the high teens and early 20s, with Sotheby’s scoring the lowest at just 15. Let’s see why…

Take this Listing Coordinator position for Sotheby’s International. It scores a 20 in Textio, which is better than their average job ad, but still weak.

One thing that jumps out: the sentences are super short. While concise sentences do work well, you still want to give the candidate a little more to go on. The best sentence length right now for job descriptions right now is 13 words.

Another things that is missing is verbs. Candidates don’t engage well with job postings that are lacking in verbs, perhaps because they want to get a concrete idea of what they will actually be doing on the job.

Now let’s look at a job post from Keller Williams that scores a strong 86:

You can see there are a lot of green highlights in the job description; this language is statistically shown to increase the number of applicants a job post. In particular a lot of the green highlights in Keller Williams job post are considered “positive language.” Using positive language encourages job seekers and they will be more likely to apply. You don’t want to “overuse” optimistic language, but having a healthy dose will help.

Here is a full list of the optimistic language included in this job post (which is just a sampling of the positive words out there!):

Now don’t you want an optimistic real estate agent? Congrats to Keller Williams for winning this round.