After advertising my property management position for a month, I received 59 email inquiries, and 13 completed applications.  I sent every inquiry a written job description so they would understand more about the buildings, the skills and responsibilities, and the compensation.

The job description was coupled with an application they were asked to fill out and email back.  Some people emailed me questions before taking the time to fill out the application, such as do I pay for cell minutes and gas, can they bring their kids to work, and how many hours/week is it.  I answered all the questions that came in.

The application is pretty simple and brief.  It asks for their name, birth date and address.  How close they live to the units is important to me.  I had one applicant that lived three hours away with no explanation about the distance.  The rest were as close as a couple of blocks and several were 45 minutes or so.

The questions on the application were mostly situational so I could guage for sales ability, motivation level, maintenance skills, ethics, and professionalism.  I could thin-slice most of the apps out of consideration just by looking at the condition of the application when it came back.  Out of the 13 apps, maybe a third were not completely filled out, the grammar or spelling was real bad, the computer skills were lacking, or the answers showed a lack of effort.

One thing I did not explicity state in the application but is a requirement of mine is that the manager own their current residence.  I wasn’t sure how many applications I would receive, or how qualified the candidates would be, so I thought I might be willing to budge on this if I had to, but as it turns out I didn’t have to.  A handful of the apps that came in were from people who currently rent.  Two of these renters would have been excellent candidates and I would have interviewed them except I had two others that owned that were very good also.

I received apps from a wide variety of candidates:

  • A couple of retired men
  • One ex-CEO with lots of civic experience
  • 55 yr old divorced bank teller
  • Stay at home dad who wanted to bring the kids with
  • Young couple
  • 19 yr old girl who was pursuing a career after determining school was not for her
  • Campground manager
  • Construction workers
  • HVAC business owner
  • 20-yr property management veteran
  • Realtors

There were two I interviewed - one computer consultant/rental property owner and one business development manager at an asset management firm (corporate-style property management).

Next time I’ll tell you how the interviews went and how I made my final decision.