If you can't get recommendations, call a few agencies and speak to them about what you're looking for and see if they have a recommendation.
When we sold our house last year, we told the agents we interviewed up front that we were interviewing 4 agents. We also told them we were ready to make a decision quickly, and would in turn let them know if we were not going to use them.
Come up with a short list of 10 questions to ask all the agents during the interview. We emailed them to the agents in advance, because we wanted full accurate answers, we did not want a bunch of - I don't know, I'll get back to you, etc.
A few questions could be how many houses have you sold?
How many current listings to do you have actively?
How many of your listings sell before the contract expires?
What would you list my house for? And how close to the asking price do they sell for?
Can you take me on as a client? When would you be ready to list?
What improvements "to-do" list would you recommend in order to get the listing ready for sale?
We interviewed one agent who came very highly recommended. He really wanted to list our house above what we were comfortable, really too high and it would just sit on the market, or get low-ball offers, because it was just too high. He had 25+ current listings and basically sourced every little task out to individial managers who did each part of the step, so in essence, you weren't really working with him at all, just a bunch of individual managers each step of the way. No, thanks, he was basically too busy.
On the contrast another gal that was a recommendation had only ever sold 2 houses and hadn't had a listing in 7 months.
We had some agents come prepared with thier ideal asking price, who were working off of inaccurate stats and were not actual comps to our home.
We had one agent with an interview who was a no call, no show, ever heard from him again
We had each agent walk the property and give us 4-5 items that should be to the top focus in order to get ready to sell, 3 of them gave the same 2 or 3 items, all the other iteams varied per agent.
We had already spent months purging our house, boxing things up, everything was staged, no clutter, all surfaces painted, ready to plunk the sign down in the yard, and one agent said it would be over a month until they could list it, because of their advertising plan would require X number print ad items and they needed a month.
All I can say is you will know when you know, as soon as our agent walked in our home, we knew she was the one. She did everything exactly as she said she would, worked quickly, was super personable, and all around everyone was very happy. In turn, she helped us sell another property, and just listed a family members home last Wed and had an offer in 48 hours.