Melissa Gillispie is the Director of Leasing and Property Management at JWB Property Management, and the 2025 NARPM Jacksonville President. She has over 11 years of experience in property management and is currently a Second Nature Triple Win Mentor.
Hiring is one of the most important decisions that you can make in property management, but it’s often rushed or overlooked. While it can be challenging, it’s absolutely worth the extra time and effort to find people who will thrive at your company.
How can you make sure you’re choosing the right people, not only for the open role, but also for your company culture? In this article, I’ll share how we approach hiring at JWB Property Management, including how we conduct interviews and make sure we’re aligned with candidates.
I had no experience in property management when I started at JWB as a trainer and administrator. Instead of being hired for my experience, I was selected for my values and belief systems, which meshed well with the rest of the company.
One of the best things about hiring in property management is that many roles are extremely teachable. You don’t need a ton of experience in the same role in order to be successful. There are certainly exceptions—like accounting or construction—that need specific hard skills. But most job responsibilities can be taught.
That provides a huge opportunity to really dig into a candidate’s values and evaluate whether they’ll be a good addition to the team, rather than looking just at their resume and work experience. In industries where roles are highly technical, you may not have that luxury. But in property management, especially because it’s such a service-focused industry, hiring for values is essential.
In the spirit of hiring for values, we focus a lot of our interview process on our company’s core values. We aim to hire people who will help our organization continue to grow, innovate, and push forward, regardless of their previous experience.
Our initial application only has one question beyond basic information: “What makes you an A-player?” We don’t even ask for a resume up front, because, again, we’re more interested in soft skills and values than specific work experience.
From there, we use an assessment tool to better understand people’s drive, motivation, and working style. Each job has different targets for different strengths, so the assessment helps us align applicants with the right positions.
Once we think someone may be a good fit, that’s the stage where we ask for a resume. We’re looking for things like attention to detail, communication style, and how they present themselves, not specific hard skills.
We’re very intentional about making our interview process thorough. We don’t want it to be overly simple or easy, because we want people who are motivated. Our application process provides natural steps where applicants who aren’t as driven will weed themselves out.
Once a candidate moves into the interview stage, we shift some of our focus to the job itself, and the skills that we want to see for that role. In the first interview, they meet with a member of our leadership team, along with the hiring manager, to talk about the skills needed. Again, this is not about their experience in a similar role. For example, someone applying to be a property manager needs customer service, organizational, and communication skills. They may have those from a past job outside of property management, and we welcome that.
Our second interview is focused specifically on core values. We want to know who you’re going to be when you show up to work everyday. We have a set list of questions that we try to ask during this stage, and they’re fully based on our particular core values. Your company’s values will vary, so you should construct your interview questions accordingly.
Finally, we conduct what we call a shadow interview. If we think someone is a good fit and we want to hire them, we have them come in for a day and actually be in the office with us. They might take phone calls, go on site visits, submit work orders, or help show a vacant unit. This is all intended to see body language, attitude, and other behavior that we might not see in a couple of short interviews.
We typically try to align shadow interviews with our company all-hands, because that’s a huge display of our culture. The idea here is that a shadow interview should be mutually beneficial; the candidate should get a sense of our culture and make sure it’s the right situation for them, just as much as we want to make sure they’re the right person for the role.
Hiring employees can seem like a daunting task. In fact, that’s why so many small companies tend to wait too long to hire. They’re so focused on trying to complete the day-to-day that they don’t prepare for hiring ahead of time, and then wind up putting it off.
One of my biggest pieces of advice for growing companies is to take the time to figure out how you want to hire before you need to hire. You don’t want to wait until a crisis is happening to decide how you’ll respond to a crisis.
A lot of companies only start thinking about growing when they’re reaching a breaking point. They’re under a ton of pressure. If you have a plan in place ahead of time, you don’t have to make emotional decisions. You can approach it logically and calmly, and make better decisions.
When you plan ahead and hire deliberately, you can create and sustain great teams to elevate our industry, and provide value and purpose-driven cultures.
Interested in learning more about structuring and expanding your business? Download Second Nature's property management business template.