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- Craft a Strong Employer Brand
- Use Data to Guide Recruitment Strategies
- Be Tailored and Targeted
- Deliver a Streamlined and Transparent Recruitment Process
- Ready To Meet Your Recruitment Goals?
The multifamily industry is dynamic and competitive, and one of its most persistent challenges is recruiting top talent. High employee turnover rates and a demanding operating environment make it essential for hiring managers to adopt strategic approaches to talent acquisition and development.
Recruiting for multifamily roles requires an understanding of the industry’s unique challenges and opportunities, as well as the ability to navigate them effectively. Insight into the following are crucial and include:
- Employee Training, Policies, and Incentives: These consistently emerge as top priorities for multifamily organizations. Highlighting these areas during recruitment can set your company apart in a crowded market.
- High Turnover and a Competitive Environment: These factors demand a strategic and targeted approach to attract skilled candidates aligned with your company culture.
In this blog, we explore strategies multifamily professionals can use to build strong recruitment pipelines, ensuring they bring on board the right people to help their organizations thrive. To stand out, hiring managers must leverage these insights to craft compelling recruitment strategies tailored to the multifamily industry’s specific needs.
Craft a Strong Employer Brand
In a competitive talent market, candidates are drawn to companies that demonstrate a genuine investment in their teams. Building a strong employer brand starts with showcasing the unique aspects that make your organization an exceptional place to work.
Consider these key elements:
- Opportunities for Training and Development: Training isn’t just a perk — it’s a proven driver of retention and performance. In fact, a reported 90% of organizations agree that training improves employee retention. It’s important to highlight your commitment to professional growth. When candidates see a pathway for skill development, they’re more likely to view your organization as a place where they can build a long-term career.
- Clear Career Paths: Top talent gravitates toward companies that offer clear, tangible opportunities for advancement. During the recruitment process, communicate how the role can evolve, whether into leadership positions or specialized roles within the company. Providing a roadmap for career growth demonstrates your commitment to employee success and sets you apart from competitors who fail to articulate these opportunities.
- Incentives and Recognition: Incentives for growth can be a powerful motivator and differentiator in attracting candidates. Competitive compensation, performance-based bonuses, and recognition programs can motivate employees to excel. These perks not only appeal to potential hires but also foster a culture of appreciation and motivation within your existing team.
Positioning your organization as one that celebrates and invests in its people will enhance its appeal to top-tier candidates.
Use Data to Guide Recruitment Strategies
A Grace Hill survey reveals a surprising opportunity for multifamily companies: mystery shopping. Despite its proven benefits, mystery shopping is underutilized, ranking last in talent management priorities. Yet 70% of respondents agree that it positively impacts employee performance.
In an independent study that included over 300 respondents across rental housing organizations of all sizes, mystery shopping was found to be a valuable tool in assessing the effectiveness of your recruitment strategies and onboarding processes. Use it to identify gaps in new hire performance, refining how you recruit and train in order to win the fight for top talent.
Read the full report: The Data Is In: Multifamily Talent Development Insights and Challenges
Be Tailored and Targeted
Recruiting top talent in the multifamily industry often requires tailored strategies for candidates from within the industry versus those from outside it. Both groups have unique strengths and challenges, so your approach should align with their experiences and skill sets.
Here’s how the strategies may differ:
4 Tips for Recruiting Talent From Within the Industry
- Emphasize Career Advancement: Industry professionals may already have a deep understanding of multifamily operations, so they often look for roles that offer growth, leadership opportunities, and exposure to innovative projects. Highlight how your organization can help them elevate their career trajectory.
- Leverage Industry Networks: Engage in targeted outreach through industry events, associations, and platforms like the National Apartment Association (NAA) or LinkedIn. Current multifamily professionals are often active in these spaces.
- Highlight Specialized Benefits: Focus on perks that align with their industry experience, such as credentials (e.g., CALP, CAM), ongoing training, or opportunities to work on high-profile properties or markets.
- Address Burnout: Many experienced professionals may have faced high-stress environments. Highlight a supportive culture, work-life balance, and opportunities to innovate, which can be attractive for seasoned talent.
4 Tips for Recruiting Talent From Outside the Industry
- Focus on Transferable Skills: While hiring experienced multifamily professionals is ideal, candidates from fields like hospitality, retail, or customer service may not have direct multifamily experience but often excel in areas like tenant relations, sales, and property management. Frame the role to show how their skills translate seamlessly.
- Provide Robust Onboarding and Training: Non-industry candidates may be apprehensive about the learning curve. Make it clear in your job postings that you’re open to training and onboarding individuals with strong transferable skills. Highlight your training programs and/or mentorship opportunities to help them feel confident in the transition.
- Communicate Industry Appeal: Multifamily offers unique opportunities for financial growth, relationship building, and long-term stability. Share success stories of others who transitioned into the industry and thrived.
- Showcase Career Potential: For those unfamiliar with the industry, outline clear career paths and how multifamily can offer diverse opportunities — from property management to marketing to regional leadership roles. Highlight programs like industry credentials (e.g., CALP or CAM) that your company will cover, which can appeal to candidates eager for growth potential.
💡Did you know: While 60% of companies pay for credentials even if they’re not required, many employees remain unaware of this benefit. Promoting these opportunities can serve as both a recruitment tool and a retention booster, signaling a commitment to professional growth.
By aligning your messaging and recruitment tactics to the candidate’s background, you’ll attract a broader and more qualified talent pool while addressing each group’s unique motivators and concerns.
Need help creating compelling job descriptions that drive set high standards and drive onsite performance?
With Grace Hill’s Policies in PerformanceHQ you get the Onsite Office & Maintenance Job Descriptions Manual. It provides the perfect format to explain responsibilities and set the tone for the performance of your onsite team.
Whether your recruitment efforts are focused within or outside the industry, you must be proactive. Don’t wait around waiting for candidates to come to you; instead:
- Leverage Industry Networks: Attend multifamily industry events, participate in forums, and connect with professional organizations to build a pipeline of candidates.
- Use Technology: Platforms like LinkedIn and specialized job boards allow you to target candidates with multifamily experience or transferable skills.
- Partner with Educational Institutions: Develop relationships with local colleges and trade schools to attract emerging talent interested in property management or real estate.
With a targeted, tailored, and proactive approach to recruitment, you will be able to stand out from the crowd and attract quality candidates.
Deliver a Positive, Streamlined, and Transparent Recruitment Process
To attract quality employees, you not only have to be in tune with today’s job seekers, but you also need to have made thoughtful changes to your employment practices. Candidates’ first impressions of your company often come from the recruitment process.
It’s true that the battle for top talent starts long before the prospective employee sits down for an interview. In a recruiting survey by PwC, 49% of job seekers in competitive fields turned down offers after a lousy recruiting experience.
So make it a positive experience by:
- Keeping communication transparent and timely.
- Streamlining the interview and onboarding processes.
- Providing clear details about expectations, compensation, and growth opportunities.
However, it’s imperative to remember that employees are looking for more and are clear about what that means: good benefits, pay, and a clear path to professional growth.
As a multifamily hiring manager, this might require you and your HR team to start thinking differently about how things are done. Katie Tumbleston, talent acquisition manager at Sprockets, offers the following questions for companies to begin asking.
- How much flexibility do we offer employees?
- Should we offer a four-day workweek?
- How much PTO do we encourage staff to take?
- How do we support employees at all levels in their growth?
- What perks and incentives can we provide to ensure our staff continues to thrive?
Don’t settle for the status quo when it comes to building a quality workforce. It’s time to go to battle for the best employees. Learn more in our ebook, “Take the Headache Out of Hiring.”
Ready To Meet Your Recruitment Goals?
Building a winning team in the multifamily industry requires a strategic and intentional approach that integrates strong recruitment practices with robust training and development programs. By focusing on transferable skills, building a strong employer brand, using data-driven insights, and engaging in proactive outreach, hiring managers can attract the best candidates to help their organizations excel.
Grace Hill has a robust set of solutions to help you meet your goals, including:
- Human Resources Training: Our Training Essentials Package includes a comprehensive Recruiting Series focused on helping you build a winning team. Strong recruiting strategies lay the foundation for a sustainable competitive advantage. This recruiting series helps you strengthen your brand and frame your unique value proposition to attract top-tier candidates and find the right players to elevate your team.
- Standard Implementation Training Schedules: Grace Hill offers training schedules to ensure new employees, whether from within or outside the industry, are equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to excel. Through tailored training paths — ranging from risk and compliance to leadership and business development — your team will thrive in their roles, driving both employee satisfaction and operational success.
⚠️But a word to the wise: Don’t forget that the hiring process isn’t just about finding the right candidate; it’s about avoiding the wrong one! Grace Hill has resources to help you recognize some common “red flags” in hiring:
- Blog: The Top 10 Hiring Red Flags You Need To Avoid
- Infographic: Top 10 Hiring Red Flags
The recruitment process is your chance to showcase your company’s commitment to growth, innovation, and employee success. By pairing a proactive, candidate-centric recruitment process with meaningful opportunities for growth, you’ll not only attract the right talent but also foster a culture that inspires long-term retention and excellence.
Take the next step in transforming your recruitment and training strategy. Partner with Grace Hill to elevate your hiring practices and develop a team that’s ready to lead your organization into the future.
Learn more about Grace Hill solutions or schedule time with one of our experts to see how we can help you meet your recruiting goals this year.