Short and sweet, hiring a team player should be the goal. If you have the fortunate or unfortunate
experience of trying to hire someone for your Leasing/Office Team (that depends
on why you need to hire someone!), may I make one suggestion? Don’t hire
someone for your Office/Leasing Team who uses the word ‘I’ almost exclusively
throughout the interview. Instead, listen for the word ‘we’ or ‘our’ at least
three times. I know – that’s kind of an arbitrary number. <SMILE>
I know when someone comes in to interview for a position,
she/he wants to make a good impression. They hopefully show up in proper
business attire, groomed, and smiling. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty,
he/she will also want to highlight his own accomplishments. But if the person
spends all the interview time talking about “I did this”, “I did that”, “I
increased NOI by such and such”, and “I reduced the cost of turns by this much”,
that’s great – so – how did YOU do all this? Alone? I don’t think so.
I really don’t think
it matters if you are hiring a Manager, Assistant Manager, Leasing Consultant
or a Maintenance Supervisor. Instinctively, we all want to show our great
results, that we should be hired on the spot, but no one works in a vacuum. I
like hiring people who know how to work within a team and still shine. Eventually,
someone who cannot, will become sullen and will not give credit where credit is
due and those people, my friends, are not going to do the team or the company any
good in the long run.
