 Hey there, this is Vlad from the Insurance Sales Lab. In this video, I'd like to go over a very simple yet super effective recruiting strategy that you can implement in your insurance agency to help you find your next great team member. The hardest part in running an insurance agency is finding great team members. Every insurance agent will agree with that statement. So, how do you find great team members? A lot of insurance agents hire recruiting companies. And recruiting companies typically charge 20 to 30 percent of the first year's pay. So, in other words, if you're going to pay your new hire $30,000 a year as their first year salary, their recruiting company will charge 20 percent of that. So, you would pay the recruiting company $6,000 if they could help you find a great team member. Now, some agents like doing that, but a lot of agents are always looking for a better, more if cost effective way to bring on new team members. And that's what I want to cover in this video. A quick note that I'll make that I personally use a platform called Ideal Trates to hire team members. If you've never heard of Ideal Trates, go to idealtrates.com. You can learn all about that there. So, it's a very simple way to bring in a lot of candidates. However, what I like to also do is build a lot of mini recruiters that will recruit on my behalf. Here's what I mean by that. You can take your existing team members, come up to them and say, look, if you can help us hire our next person or really indefinitely, as many people as you refer to our agency that go through our interview process that get license and we hire them, I will pay you $1,000 per person that you refer to work in our agency. And if they make it through their 90 day probationary period, then I'll give you an extra $500 or an extra $1,000. And then guess what? Not only will your team members be out there recruiting on your behalf, but they'll also make sure that if this person does get hired that they do a good job in the first 90 days because they get another commission check on top of that or a finder's fee on top of that. So, that's something you can do with your existing team members. You can do that with your friends, family members. Simply ask the people that you know, hey, who is the most talented person that you know that lives here in our area in Houston, Texas, whatever area you're in, what does that person do for work? And then you can ask your team member, how do you think this person would do if they worked in our agency? And here's something that's super important to note that even if you have someone that gets referred to your agency as a great candidate, don't shortcut your interview process. Have every applicant, every candidate should apply online, take the assessment. If you have them take assessments, which I highly recommend and then do a phone interview and then bring them into an in-person interview. Don't shortcut your interview process just because someone was referred to you. That'll avoid a lot of bad hires and a lot of negative conversations and awkward conversations that could be totally avoidable up front by not bringing it on the wrong person. So, that all being said, I would start with your existing team members and then switch over to your friends, family members. You can even post that question on social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and see who can be referred to your agency. And in that way, if that's what you're doing, you've built a system where you have a lot of recruiters working on your behalf, sending candidates your way. You don't have to hire everybody, but at least you have people applying to work in your agency. So, think about how incentivized your team members would be to send people to apply in the agency if they get paid a thousand bucks. Okay. So, that's the strategy. It's very simple. And if you're watching this video and you're thinking, okay, one of the areas that I struggle with is finding a good compensation plan to pay my team members, whether it's sales or CSRs. I did a video not long ago with a huge Allstate agent, an agent who started from scratch and built his agency to now it's about a $20 million book of business. And in that video, we discussed a compensation plan that a lot of top producing insurance agents use. So, whether you're a captive agent, independent agent, this compensation plan could work for your team members. If you'd like to see that compensation plan and the conversation that I had with that agent, then there's going to be a link right below this video. You can click on that opt in and I'll send you that video and I'll send you that compensation plan. So, if you like this video, make sure you share it with other agents. And if you have any questions, please reach out. Thanks so much for watching this video. Take care.