Innovative Property Maintenance Staff Hiring Strategies

5/29/2024 (Permalink)

Hiring Maintenance Staff

In the world of property management, having the most beautiful and desirable properties means nothing if you don’t have professional staff to maintain those properties. When it comes to maintaining your own personal property, you can let maintenance issues slide if you want, but commercial properties are different.

When someone is paying to rent or lease a piece of commercial real estate, your job as a property manager is to ensure your organization meets its contractual obligations. This usually means maintaining properties for safety, security, and function. Failure to maintain managed properties can result in accidents, injuries, lawsuits, and a host of other problems.

Finding the Right Team Members Can Be Difficult

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find property maintenance workers. This may be due to a lack of skilled workers in your area or a lack of time to search nearby candidates thoroughly. Whatever the reason for your difficulty in finding property maintenance workers, the good news is that there are innovative strategies you can try that are more effective than simply placing an ad in the newspaper.

If you’re having a hard time getting the right maintenance service professionals onboard at your commercial properties, below are some strategies to consider:

Use Dedicated Job Boards

Online job boards can be effective when you need to hire someone to fill a general position, but the role of someone who works for a property management company is often demanding and specific. Maintenance professionals will need to have a keen eye for detail and have the ability to work alone. Additionally, these jobs typically require maintenance staff members to possess customer service skills since they often interact with tenants at commercial properties.

Consider looking for industry-specific job boards instead of posting job openings on a general job board. General job boards attract applicants across various industries, so they may not target professionals with the skills your role demands. A job board dedicated to commercial property maintenance professionals or professionals in a complementary field may yield better and faster results than a general job board. Also, the caliber of applicants calling your office may be higher when you post to job boards dedicated to property management and maintenance.

Check Out Social Media and User-Generated Content Sites

Remember that job boards also exist outside of dedicated hiring and career sites. Some social media platforms host job boards, and you might also find job boards on user-generated content sites like Reddit. These options, in particular, can help you to drill down on the specific audiences you want to target. This approach may yield more effective results since you can advertise available maintenance positions to people in communities that are already interested in commercial property maintenance issues.

Consider Part-Time Positions

Maintenance work keeps tenants happy at rental properties, but there are usually only so many full-time positions within your budget. If your full-time maintenance staff cannot handle everything in a day, you may need to consider hiring a maintenance technician on a part-time basis to fill in the gaps.

This can be advantageous in cases where you have one-off repairs that need to be completed but not enough work to keep a full-time employee busy. For example, if your property has suffered damage from a fire, restoration will be needed, but this will usually only require temporary help.

Fire damage restoration may be a job best left to a contractor or third-party company specializing in disaster recovery and cleanup. Still, your part-time workers can be directed to help as well. This keeps you from hiring a full-time maintenance worker who may need to be laid off after completing the project.

Why Hiring a Contractor May Make More Sense

Working with a contractor can also benefit when your staff lacks the adequate equipment or training to handle one-off situations. Investing in novel equipment or specialized training may not be worth it unless you deal with a maintenance issue regularly. Instead, bringing in a contractor for temporary work may make more financial sense and keep you from hiring mistakes.

Audit Your Existing Workforce Before Hiring

In some cases, it’s better to conduct an audit of your existing staff before beginning your search for property maintenance workers. It can be easy to think that hiring is the right move when you’re feeling overwhelmed with work orders, but an audit may reveal that all you need to do is manage your existing staff more efficiently.

For instance, if you have three general maintenance professionals on-site during the day but only one at night, the worker on the night shift may fall behind when work gets heavy. By conducting an audit to examine what workloads look like at various times of the day in different areas of a commercial property, you might find some room to move people around.

Shifting Staff May Buy You Some Time

If less work is required during the day and two workers will be sufficient, consider moving one of your daytime workers to the night shift. This balances out your labor and can buy you time to find property maintenance workers. You may discover you don’t need to hire anyone because your new scheduling and management system has smoothed out any kinks in your commercial property maintenance plan.

SERVPRO of Arcadia Helps Property Managers in Times of Need

If you’ve found it difficult to find the right team members to help with cleanup after a fire or other disaster, SERVPRO® restoration is the answer. Our Arcadia restoration specialists serve as an extension of your team to put the pieces back together. Contact us today to discuss how we can help at your managed property.