DGS 260: Your Property Management Hire Doesn't Need "Experience"
Description
When hiring a new team member in your property management business, one common mistake can cause you to lose out on potentially the best candidates.
In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull discuss why having experience in property management is not a necessary qualification for the people you hire.
You’ll Learn
[01:11 ] The Myth of Needing Experience
[04:19 ] More Important Than Experience: Culture Fit
[13:59 ] You Need a Better Hiring System
[19:17 ] What to do if You Struggle with Hiring
Tweetables
“If you don't even know what your culture is, how are you going to figure out if they match that?”
“If they're not the right culture fit for sure you're overpaying or they're underperforming, either way, you're overpaying.”
“Even if you hire based off of experience, you still have to train that person. That does not forego the training.”
“If people are only loyal to a dollar, then yeah, you're at risk of losing those people pretty easily.”
Resources
Transcript
[00:00:00 ] Jason: If they're not the right culture fit for sure you're overpaying or they're underperforming or either way you're overpaying.
[00:00:06 ] Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
[00:00:45 ] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. We're your hosts, property management growth experts, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, and Sarah Hull, co owner and COO of DoorGrow.
[00:01:06 ] Now let's get Into the show.
[00:01:08 ] All right. What are we talking about today, Sarah?
[00:01:11 ] Sarah: I wanted to talk about this thing that keeps coming up and I've seen it two times in the last week is hiring on experience.
[00:01:21 ] Jason: Oh.
[00:01:22 ] Sarah: Everyone goes, "Oh yeah, I would love somebody who's experienced and they already know the industry and they already know my systems and they know how to do things. And that would be fantastic."
[00:01:32 ] Jason: People listening are going to go, "well, yeah, of course you want people with experience. It would be dumb to have people with zero experience, right?"
[00:01:38 ] Sarah: Wrong!
[00:01:39 ] Jason: Okay. Okay. So let's explain this. What are you talking about?
[00:01:43 ] Sarah: All right, so the first thing that I'm going to say, as soon as I say it, it'll click right? If we are lucky to hire someone who's already familiar with the industry, who's working in the industry. Maybe they understand some of your tools, your software, perhaps some of your processes. You're narrowing your candidate pool to such a tiny little minutiae of a candidate pool. How many people do you think there are that have experience in property management that are now in the job market?. Right? Like, "Oh, I'm only going to hire somebody if they have experience in property management, or I'm only going to hire somebody if they understand how to use Appfolio." All right. So we went from here to here, tiny little segment of the market.
[00:02:33 ] The other thing I'll say about this is if you find someone who has experience in the property management industry, and perhaps even in your software and your processes. Why is it that they're looking for a job? If they were so great, would someone not have snatched them up already?
[00:02:49 ] Jason: What if they get them to come from another company?
[00:02:52 ] Like they convinced them?
[00:02:53 ] Sarah: Let's talk about that. I'm glad you brought that up. I'm so glad. It was like this morning, we were having a conversation and I had mentioned this to one of our clients who's currently trying to hire people based off of experience. So here's the other problem, and we've seen this a couple of times, businesses stealing other businesses' team members and employees. There's one case that I'm thinking of in particular that kind of getting a little nasty. The two competitors are trying to take what they can, clients, team members, whatever they can, market share. They're just trying to take anything that they can from the other one. And one of them snatched the operator, which is really.
[00:03:33 ] Not a good person to lose in your business.
[00:03:36 ] Jason: Yeah. No.
[00:03:36 ] Sarah: Why was that able to happen though? She had experience, right? So the new company is like, "Oh, this is perfect. She understands property management. She's got experience. She knows how to do this."
[00:03:46 ] Jason: I mean, most entrepreneurs would think it's just about money because entrepreneurs always look through the lens of money. So they'll think, "well, she probably just got a better offer."
[00:03:54 ] Sarah: And in this case, I bet she did.
[00:03:56 ] Jason: Okay.
[00:03:56 ] Sarah: And the problem that we're overlooking here is we're skipping the most important part, which is looking to see if they're a culture fit.
[00:04:06 ] And then the second most important part is looking to see, are they the right personality fit for the role. And then and only then do we want to look at their skill set and experience and do they have the intelligence level to be able to learn that particular task.
[00:04:18 ] Jason: Right? This is one of our frameworks, the three fits, culture fit, skill fit, personality fit, and culture fit, most important.
[00:04:26 ] So, yeah, I agree. If people are not the right culture fit, then by default, you're overpaying for your team members, period. Because either they're underperforming because they don't really believe in your business or buy in. So their secret goal really is just to get paid as much as possible and probably do as little work as possible would be their ideal, right?
[00:04:48 ] And so that's if they're not a culture fit. If they're a culture fit, they buy into the vision, they believe in you, they're excited to work for you. They want to have an impact. They have a motive besides just getting paid. And so, yeah, they're not a culture fit, it's guaranteed you're overpaying for that team member.
[00:05:03 ] Because either they're crappy or you're having to like compensate them a bunch of money in order to keep them on board at your business because they really don't enjoy being there. So then you end up overpaying in order to keep them. And if people are only loyal to a dollar, then yeah, you're at risk of losing those people pretty easily.
[00:05:22 ] Sarah: Absolutely. And that is why this particular operator was able to be swayed. So if you've got people who are a culture fit, if you've got people who really believe in the company, in you as the business owner, in the vision and the mission, where you are wanting to go and what you are wanting to build, if people are truly bought in and on board with that, that makes all the difference in everything that they do.
[00:05:52 ] So can you hire somebody with experience who understands how to use Buildium or Propertyware or your phone system, whatever it is, and your ticket system? Yeah. And they can come in and they can do the job and it would be a night and day difference If you had somebody who truly believed in your company and you had to just train them to do those things and then they were able to do that, they're going to outperform the person who only has the experience every day of the week.
[00:06:22 ] Jason: Okay. So can you share an example? Because you, you mentioned some clients were having issues with this. So like, let's tie this in with maybe a story.
[00:06:31 ] Sarah: Yeah. So it was just last week I was talking with Andrew and he had recently hired a couple of team members. I think he hired a BDM and an admin and there was maybe someone for maintenance.
[00:06:43 ] I don't remember who the third one was. So he had recently hired these people. Already he's looking to replace them because either they're not working out or they're moving on.
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