New Hiring Resources Coming in 2020

With Adair Bryan, Human Resources

Transwestern is committed to equipping hiring managers with tools and resources to effectively identify and vet promising talent. We asked Adair Bryan, our Recruitment HR Business Partner, about current staffing challenges and the ongoing effort to address them.

TW: The national unemployment rate has been at or near a 50-year low for some time. How is the scarcity of available labor affecting Transwestern?

Adair: Finding exceptional talent is always challenging but knowing what talent is available in each market is paramount, given the unemployment rate. This is critical in Asset Services as well as the brokerage community. This year and moving into 2020, we are focused on getting ahead of a staffing crunch forming in the Asset Services sector. We already have a great need for building engineers and expect that requirement to intensify in markets throughout the country. A large group of the nation’s building engineers are reaching retirement age and there aren’t enough young entrants to the sector to replace them, let alone fill the new jobs created to serve growing demand. This is an industry-wide trend.

TW: What are we doing to prepare?

Adair: We’ve formed an engineer recruiting committee in each region and they are all crafting strategies to get ahead of this challenge. Katie Sakach, our national Managing Director of Asset Services, describes the situation and our response beautifully in the cover story of Insights, Transwestern’s client magazine, which published last month. Katie also worked with René Wineland in our Denver office to contribute a similar article to Colorado Real Estate Journal, which ran in September.

Essentially, we are alerting hiring managers to act now rather than wait until they have a job opening to fill. We want them to expand their recruiting channels by contacting colleges, universities and trade schools that produce graduates with the skills to become building engineers. Visit high schools and job fairs and tell students about the excellent career opportunities in property management. Our industry needs to funnel more people into the training pipeline, informing candidates about where they can go for training and what kind of incomes to expect if they pursue a career in building management.

TW: Where can local team members learn more about effective recruiting?

Adair: A good place to start is to read Katie’s Insights article. In fact, we are sending it to schools and guidance counselors so they can tell students about the building engineer career track. We will send the same document to Asset Services teams to print and distribute at job fairs, schools and local events. They can circulate the article as a way to introduce themselves and Transwestern to educators and community leaders in a position to help us reach potential candidates.

Then in January, we will roll out an internal recruiting guide for hiring managers in all service lines, to be housed on TranSource. The guide will cover how to conduct interviews and provide questions to ask candidates, as well as a standard candidate-evaluation form. We are including a list of colleges and universities that managers can contact when they have professional services job openings, and a list of trade schools that can help fill engineering positions.

TW: Hiring managers aside, are there opportunities for team members to help in this effort?

Adair: Yes, there are. Team members continue to be our greatest recruiting resource, our eyes and ears in the community. They know our culture and can often recognize intuitively those individuals that would be good additions to our organization.

That’s why we offer monetary incentives for successful referrals. If a referral results in the placement of a full-time, salaried position, the referrer receives a $2,000 bonus. For a referral resulting in placement of a full-time, hourly position, the incentive is $1,000. In both cases, half is paid within 30 days of hire and the other half is paid after the new team member has been in their position for six months.

For Adair’s perspective on what makes Transwestern a best place to work, watch her video from our 40th anniversary series.