Search Results for: top talent
Winning Strategies in the Multifamily Talent Arena
How to Attract, Retain, and Develop Top Talent in the Multifamily Property Management Sector
Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash
The multifamily property management sector is experiencing an escalating war for talent. With growing competition and a shifting landscape, attracting the right professionals requires a deep understanding of what motivates them and how to foster their growth. This brief note offers multifamily executives insightful strategies to win this battle, focusing on attraction, retention, and professional development. We will explore the problem of talent scarcity and present solutions with tangible benefits for your organization.
Finding and retaining top talent has become one of the most pressing issues in multifamily property management. The industry is increasingly competitive, and the demand for skilled team members is rising. The challenge lies in identifying individuals with the right blend of technical expertise, creativity, and passion to engage with residents. How do multifamily executives find these ideal candidates and keep them engaged? The problem is complex and requires a nuanced approach.
Solutions:
- Emphasize Culture and Values: By creating a workplace culture resonant with the values of potential team members, you can attract those who align with your mission. This alignment ensures a more harmonious work environment and enhances the likelihood of long-term retention.
- Offer Tailored Professional Development: Offering customized professional growth opportunities demonstrates your investment in your team members’ futures. By fostering their career growth, you enhance their skills and build loyalty.
- Engage with Team Members: Encouraging veteran team members to engage actively with new team members helps foster community. This connection enriches the working experience and promotes higher satisfaction among team members.
- Implement Competitive Compensation Packages: Salary isn’t everything, but it matters. By researching and offering competitive compensation packages, you signal to prospective team members your recognition of their value.
- Utilize Technology: Leverage technology to streamline hiring and ensure you reach suitable candidates. Utilizing appropriate platforms can make the recruitment process more efficient and targeted.
- Invest in Wellness: Focus on the overall well-being of your team members. A happy, healthy team member is often more productive and loyal.
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Multifamily Talent Shortage
Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash
Currently, it’s a significant challenge to find qualified candidates to fill open positions in the multifamily industry.
The demand for talent is high, while the supply is low, which has created a talent shortage. Recent reports suggest that 38% of hiring managers are experiencing difficulty finding suitable candidates for their positions. And it’s not just the traditionally high turnover positions like leasing consultants and maintenance technicians. It’s every position at every level.
The shortage has obvious and serious consequences, including slower resident service, further increased turnover, losing ground to competitors, and reduced productivity due to the time and energy required for onboarding, training, and cultural immersion.
Despite this seemingly ongoing trend, my encouragement is to avoid knee-jerk reactions, such as racing to the top in terms of compensation. Or highering the first person who passes the mirror test. It’s critical to take a proactive approach to address the issue.
This means looking inward and spending time in the trenches to understand better what is going on in the organization. Asking questions, such as how to improve happiness, strengthen relationships, eliminate obstacles, and encourage the use of passions, can help to identify and address potential areas for improvement. It’s individual deep work with all team members. People need to feel heard, and they need to know that you see them.
In short, ensure you have an attractive work culture before making other drastic moves to attract and retain talent.
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Multifamily War for Talent
*Rudux
Lisa Trosien wrote a great piece for PayLease in 2015. As I read it, I nodded in agreement more than once. The War for Talent is in full motion. And the perfect storm provides tailwinds that will keep it moving for some time. Multifamily construction is off the charts, the qualified labor pool is all but dried up, and expectations are way out of alignment with the real world.
Multifamily Construction
Multifamily permits, starts, and absorption are firing in unison and seeming have no headwinds to contend with. At least in the near term. And all of these new products incite leasing professionals to follow the money. In some respects, Property management companies across the land are victims of their own doing. We build beautiful new communities with the need to fill them fast to get long-term debt in place while interest rates are low. It’s a race. And it has put in place a #gameon War for Talent.
Labor Pool
I will dispute the one point made in the article. Well-qualified talent is not hard to find but requires hard work and effort. The key is beating the streets. Stop relying exclusively on the HR team to do the job. And interview constantly.
Make it a point to shop high-end retail, restaurants, hospitality, and other service-oriented organizations. Pick companies that you know have heavily mandated customer-centric and/, or sales-oriented training in place. Yes – be ready to pay more but also be ready to expect more.
Schedule interviews constantly. Set aside 30 to 45 minutes a week to meet and talk to prospective employees, even if you are at capacity. Always be building your bench.
And be ready to restructure the way you do business. That is to suggest turning the way you drive your business upside down. Do you need a property manager? Maybe you need a Sales Manager instead. With the advent of the Internet and thus the ability to automate nearly 100% of the back office, you can void the PM title. With that in mind, you can afford to pay leasing/salespeople more through incentives or base rates.
Expectations
On the point of tattoos and piercings. Stick with me on this – people like to do business with people they like. Most of the current renter pool is ripe with young talented self-expressing people. And baby boomers who like to associate with the current renter pool and their youthful ways. Suffice it to say; the tattooed-brow-pierced twenty-something is precisely who our current renter wants to do business with. They are interesting. They are people. They stand for something. They are likable. Just because they don’t look like you and like the things you do does not mean they aren’t worth every dime they expect.
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Talent Wars & Battle Plans
The war for talent is more than a headline. It’s a conversation found in board rooms, daily huddles, and on just about every social media platform as hiring managers lament the challenges in sourcing and retaining new team members. Many factors contribute to the challenging job market. Unemployment claims are at the lowest point in decades, baby boomers are aging out of the market, and in a movement dubbed “The Great Resignation” hundreds of thousands voluntarily left jobs this year. Meanwhile, the rise in gig work gave many workers freedoms rarely offered in traditional job roles. Many job openings are the result of existing team members who left for greener pastures such as more money, better benefits, improved quality of life, or from unhappiness in their role or the overall organization.
Inc., Forbes, Fortune, and dozens of other publications have published articles on this topic, some even positing that the war for talent will continue through 2031. While some may disagree with a point or conclusion in one of these articles, it seems clear that employers must revisit and rethink how to attract, retain, and motivate new team members.
Competitive Set
Every multifamily operator understands the fundamentals of supply and demand in terms of apartments, market comparables, rent rates, resident satisfaction and retention, amenities, and other desirable factors. No operator worth their salt would attempt to lease up a property without knowing their competitive market and understanding what sets them apart from all the other options a renter has – because success is measured by the consumer, the one with the ability to choose.
The war for talent is in many ways similar to a lease-up – albeit one where five other new construction properties came on the market at the exact same time with similar cutting-edge amenities and sky-high rents. The job market competitors are a little harder to define – you could lose a candidate to a company in another time zone not just down the street. In any case, it’s time to pull out all the stops, define your competitive edge, and reimagine your marketing strategy.
Culture as a Differentiator
If your pay rates are competitive with the market, benefits are top-notch, and your practice of work-life balance is more than just a worn-out phrase, then you may be closer to a level playing field, but that doesn’t close the deal. Ultimately, culture is the differentiator. If this is war, then now is the time to make radical changes in your battle plan and lead the charge with an authentic culture that places importance on the things that matter to employees.
As leaders, if you haven’t done the work of doing a deep evaluation of your company’s culture then get to it. I encourage you to examine your mission statements and core values and honestly analyze your culture. Where is organizational behavior aligned with your promised culture and what needs to be recalibrated? Culture is your organization’s DNA and should form your operational common language. Does everyone in your company understand its core values? Where are the pain points – the places where corporate and leadership actions diverge from your stated values? Those disconnects become the fertile soil of disillusionment for current employees and can lead to dissatisfaction and turnover.
Shot Gun Hiring
The rush to hire as quickly as possible can lead to a potential culture killer. As companies become desperate to fill empty seats, both to get the necessary work done and to relieve the pressure on existing overburdened staff, it is possible, even probable, that alignment with cultural values will be downgraded on the list of hiring criteria. This type of shotgun hiring is a short-term solution that requires a strategy to encourage cultural cohesion. Consider employees’ introduction to the company and support their internal job path with education, peer-to-peer connections, and frequent touchpoints to provide feedback and encouragement – something even more important when new hires work remotely and miss out on the experience of informal connectivity. In the end, the goal is to transition all new hires into engaged team members and fans of the organization while keeping the core values of your company intact.
Has your company developed a winning battle plan for the war on talent? Share your thoughts with us here or on our social media pages.
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Speed Dating for Talent
Just over a decade ago, I wrote this post about the need for savvy operators to build brand loyalty with their residents because of the impact the great recession would have on apartment occupancy. Today’s battle for market share is all about talent. Companies are fighting to fill the holes in their teams with the best available people. Facing a tight employment market where recruiting is becoming more difficult, it is time to fine-tune your culture. When everything else is the same – wages, benefits, etc. – culture is the tiebreaker. Smart job seekers know this, and it is critical that your culture stands out. Be vigilant about course-correcting any cultural dissonance. Your existing team and your future team are holding you accountable for it.
Swipe Right for Culture
Now is the time for innovations in recruitment and hiring. Potential candidates speed date through the endless options for employment and if you want to be the company that causes them to swipe right, you need to think in terms of the team member experience and how you ensure that your company lives up to the hype.
Zero to Ten – Where is your pain level?
Every company has some form of financial review process. It is an important measure of business health. I encourage you to add a cultural review to your routine. Ask good questions. Listen thoughtfully to responses. What is the story behind the story? Where are the cultural pain points and what can you do to relieve them? What is the temperature of your current team members? How connected are they to your culture?
Gut Check
The current employment market is not a call to hire whoever you can get. Top talent is still available and those are the people you want to attract. Avoid the panic hire – the one that you knew in your gut wasn’t the right fit for the position or the company. That path leads to an inevitable painful exit which further tarnishes the opportunity for brand loyalty. It isn’t fair to anyone and shakes the confidence of your team.
Passion Play
I don’t have a magic wand to produce key talent in this unusual market. But I do know that it is my job to ensure that our culture is healthy. It is the sort of work that is harder to quantify but it pays the biggest dividends in the end. My parents’ generation favored the stability of lifelong careers at one company. Workers today are less afraid of uncertainty and want to do work that feeds their spirits and their bank accounts. Passion is the name of the game. You don’t have to change everything about your culture, but you do need your company to be who you say you are.
What are you doing to ensure your culture delivers on your brand promises?
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