When is the ideal time to recruit?

#1

Do you have a recruitment plan? Is there such a thing as an “ideal” time to recruit new property managers and BDMs?

When thinking about recruitment within your business, do you find that you always end up hiring too early or too late? ie; not enough work (or income!) for the new recruit, or current staff are too much under the pump and there isn’t a decent candidate in sight so you end up hiring someone that’s possibly not that suitable?

Would be interested to hear what strategies people have in place

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#2

Hey @rikki, a great topic…

We have had this problem before where we hire too early or too late. If I had to choose, it will always be to hire too early…

When you hire too late, your team are already behind and stretched and it means the quality of service drops, and burn out is likely. Also, almost worse is that your new recrit is not fully inducted and trained as your stretched, so even when you have the right number of staff, your not delivering on the levels of service you should.

We are a smallish team at Wendells, (14 staff) and we aim to have “one up our sleve” so that if someone leaves / holiday cover / we bring on a big contract were not behind already. Its not the cheapest way to do it, but keeping clients happy and having a low churn is our focus so it balances out.

love to hear how everyone else manages this mine field…

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#3

This a great question @rikki and one I get a lot from members. When should we recruit new team members? To take the guesswork out of it, we need a way to measure team capacity. We often use the number of properties per PM or the salary percentage of revenue in a portfolio, it doesn’t really matter how you measure it, but it is important to know when your team members reach capacity. With that in mind, you can know more easily plan for when you will need new recruits.

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#4

Thanks for the webinar today Adam - great information on how to staff the team and their capacity / salary and the information provided certainly helps in the forecasting of team members and when to start looking to add to the team

I agree with your comment in regards to regional / rural PM’s managing less numbers - however I have noted in the last 12-18 months - as long as you have great systems in place and embrace the technology that is now available for use - our capacity has actually increased “out in the bush”

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#5

That’s great @louiseschofield and I agree with your comments. Good systems and support create more efficiency in your team and they will be able to manage more properties. Awesome that this is reflecting in your team. A tribute to the hard work you are doing :slight_smile: