Hire a Team Player

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.