What Is the Difference Between a Recruiter and a Director of Growth?

Definitions of the Two Roles

A real estate recruiter is a team or brokerage employee or contractor whose primary output is recruiting appointments with licensed agents. The recruiter builds and works a recruiting database, contacts agents by phone, text and social media, holds first appointments and moves qualified candidates to a second meeting with the team leader or broker owner. The full scope of that role, including weekly activity targets and reporting lines, is set out in What Does a Real Estate Recruiter Do? Titles for the role include recruiter, recruiting coordinator and growth manager.

A director of growth is a leadership role responsible for the size and quality of the roster as a whole. The role typically sets recruiting strategy, manages one or more recruiters, owns onboarding and the first 90 days of each hire, monitors retention and works with leadership on agent productivity. Where the recruiter's work ends at a signed agreement, the director of growth's work continues through the agent's tenure. The title is used inconsistently across the industry, and some organizations apply it to positions that consist mainly of recruiting calls.

Team leaders who want both functions installed with the database, scorecard and onboarding workflow behind them can see how the Territory Takeover System works at theinnercirql.com/operators/.

Why Organizations Separate the Functions

Organizations separate the two functions because recruiting volume and roster growth are distinct problems that can occur independently. A team can hold many recruiting appointments and still fail to grow if recent hires leave, and a team with strong retention can still stall if no one is starting new conversations. According to the Delta Media Group 2026 Real Estate Leadership Report, which surveyed more than 100 brokerage leaders whose firms were responsible for more than two-thirds of 2025 U.S. home sales, 63% named recruiting top agents as a challenge and 54% named agent productivity. HousingWire reported both figures, and Real Estate News reported the same survey as showing 63% citing recruitment as their primary challenge.

The two percentages describe the two halves of the director of growth role. Recruiting top agents is the volume problem that a recruiter addresses directly. Agent productivity concerns agents already on the roster, which falls outside a recruiter's usual scope and inside a director of growth's. An organization that assigns both problems to a recruiter typically measures the recruiter on outcomes the recruiter does not control. The leader's responsibilities to agents already on the roster are described in What Should a Real Estate Team Leader Provide Agents?

Metrics for Each Role

The recruiter's metrics are activity and conversion figures at the front of the funnel. They commonly include new recruiting conversations per week, first appointments held, second meetings booked and the conversion from appointment to hire. In Blake Suddath's 2025 recruiting calendar, 685 recruiting appointments produced 115 full-time experienced agent hires, about six appointments per hire, a ratio that allows a monthly hiring goal to be converted into weekly appointment targets. Blake Suddath's account of which figures to track weekly is published on BlakeSuddath.com in What KPIs Should Real Estate Recruiters Track?

The director of growth's metrics are outcome figures across the agent lifecycle. The principal measure is net agent growth, defined as experienced agents hired minus agents who departed over a 12-month period. Supporting measures include the share of hires still active at 90 days, per-agent transaction sides and volume, and the share of hires referred by existing agents. The last measure links retention to recruiting: in Blake Suddath's 2025 record, 78 of the 115 hires were referred by producing agents he had recruited.

Team Size and Hiring Sequence

Team size largely determines whether a separate director of growth role is warranted. According to the National Association of REALTORS 2026 Member Profile, reported by NAR and HousingWire, 21% of REALTORS worked as part of a team in 2025, and teams averaged four members. At that size a dedicated growth executive would have no recruiters to manage and a small roster to retain, and the team leader typically performs the function. The same report found that team-based brokerage specialists had a median of 32 transaction sides in 2025, compared with nine for the typical individual agent.

The common sequence is for the team leader to perform both functions first, then to add a recruiter or recruiting coordinator to take over appointment volume while the leader retains strategy, offers and retention. A separate director of growth is typically added when there is at least one recruiter to manage, when the organization operates in more than one office or market, or when the roster is large enough that onboarding and retention require a full-time owner. Compensation structures for the recruiter role are described in How Do Real Estate Recruiters Get Paid?

Retention as Part of the Growth Function

Retention is the component that most clearly distinguishes the director of growth from the recruiter. According to Redfin's 2025 Industry Survey of 500 agents from brokerages other than Redfin across 46 states, fielded by Ipsos between December 2024 and January 2025, 13.4% of agents switched brokerages in the previous 12 months and 15% planned to switch in the following 12. Nowbam's summary of the survey reports the same figures, together with the finding that 19.4% of agents who switched in 2024 planned to switch again. For a growing roster, departures at these rates can offset a meaningful share of a recruiter's hires.

The director of growth typically addresses retention through onboarding, regular one-on-one meetings with recent hires and review of hires from the previous 90 days in the weekly recruiting meeting. The structure of that meeting, in which recent hires are reviewed by name alongside the active pipeline, is described in What Should a Weekly Recruiting Meeting Cover? The first-week transfer of an experienced hire's business, which the director of growth commonly owns, is set out in What Should an Experienced Agent Do in Their First Week on a New Team?

The team leader's role persists regardless of who holds the growth title. Blake Suddath has described the leader as the central part of the offer to an experienced agent, saying in a recorded coaching call, "Human beings leave other human beings. To be led. By other human beings." In this view a director of growth can own the system for retention, but the leader remains the person agents are choosing to work under.

Common Errors in Defining the Roles

Three errors recur in how organizations define these roles. The first is assigning the director of growth title to a position whose duties are limited to recruiting calls, which sets expectations for net growth without the authority over onboarding or retention needed to meet them. The second is holding a recruiter accountable for hires, when experienced agents typically make the decision in a second meeting with the leader rather than with the recruiter. The third is compensating recruiting activity on a per-hire basis without assigning anyone responsibility for the period after the hire, which can produce hires without producing a larger roster.

A fourth, less visible error is defining either role before the underlying system exists. A recruiter or director of growth who joins an organization without a recruiting database, pipeline stages, a scorecard or a written onboarding process typically spends the first months building those tools rather than producing results. Organizations that want the system installed before the seat is filled can apply at theinnercirql.com/operators/. Blake Suddath's treatment of the pay structures for the recruiter role is published on BlakeSuddath.com in How Should a Real Estate Team Pay a Recruiter?

Frequently Asked Questions

Real estate team leaders, broker owners and recruiters who want to decide which growth seat to fill, with the recruiting system and onboarding behind it installed in their market, can apply with Blake Suddath and Tyler Lewis at theinnercirql.com/operators/.