3 Tricks to Finding Apartment Industry Talent When Talent is Scarce
Perhaps you have exhausted your resources, investigated your networks, and interviewed a surplus of candidates for your open apartment regional manager position—and have yet to discover talent that will prove invaluable to your company. Rather than saturating the ranks of the unemployed, talented employees are most likely already employed for their sought-after status. So how do you find talent when it is scarce?
1.) Expand Your Search.
When you’ve already expended your usual hiring networks without luck, it is time to expand the reach of your search. One means by which this can be accomplished is through social media outlets. Social media pages are an ideal way to communicate what your apartment management company is about as well as advertise job openings. These pages offer an inexpensive means of ‘branding’ your company so that it appeals to your target job candidates and increases your company’s reach.
2.) Hire Continually Rather than Coincidentally.
This concept is best demonstrated with a sports analogy: if you are the manager of a baseball team and one of your players quits unexpectedly your inclination is to hire the best possible player to fill that space. However, the superstar player you would like to have on your team is most likely already playing for another; and therefore you are forced to contract an unemployed lower-skilled player. The same holds true for hiring. Instead of seeking potential apartment industry employees due to the coincidence that there is an open position within your property management company, seek to continually be on the lookout for talent. Social networking is the most effective way to go about doing this, by seeking to establish connections and relationships in order to hire talent either immediately or when a position opens that interests them.
3.) Think Outside the Box.
While talented employees look great on paper, they also have a spark that makes them successful—they are passionate about their work, innovative, and driven. Finding talent in a competitive market is about more than locating skilled applicants—as an hiring authority for an apartment management company you must also be able to recognize them. Sometimes the employees that turn out to be invaluable are those that, while they may be lacking a bullet point on their resumes, have a real passion for the company. And on the other hand, those who have impressive experience but the wrong attitude can turn out to be a mistake. Throughout the hiring process a mindset of thinking outside the box, and not limiting candidates to their appearance on paper, can lead to a talent goldmine.
Making these adjustments in your property management company’s hiring process and it’s approach to finding talent can lead to big payoffs—as talented employees can prove invaluable in the innovation, customers, and revenue they bring in.