how far ahead should you start hiring property talent? | hiring playbook part 1.
What We’ll Cover.
01. Why the fastest property hires start 8 to 12 weeks before the brief.
02. The internal groundwork to do before you call a recruiter or post a job ad.
03. How to forecast hiring from your project program, not your vacancies.
Most of the hiring conversations we have with Melbourne property businesses start when there’s already a gap in the team. The role is vacant, the project is moving, and someone was needed yesterday.
The hires that close fastest are often the ones that started slowest. They begin as a conversation, not a vacancy, 8 to 12 weeks before anyone needs to make an offer.
This guide is about how property employers can get ahead of the brief, so the hire lands when you need it, with the right person in the seat.
01. why the fastest property hires start before the brief.
There is a pattern we see again and again. A client calls in Q1 to say they will need a development manager, an analyst, or a transactions lead in Q3. That’s the right instinct, but the mistake is assuming the process starts in Q3.
It does not. If you want someone in the seat by quarter-end, the recruiter conversation needs to start eight to 12 weeks earlier. Not the brief, the conversation.
The brief is the end of the planning, not the start of it. By the time a role is fully scoped, approved, and written up, the best candidates for it may already be mid-process somewhere else. The earlier we talk, the more of the market we can reach before it moves.
This matters more in property than in most sectors, because property hiring runs on longer cycles. Senior candidates carry longer notice periods. Sales and transactions people are often waiting on commission or bonus they will forfeit if they leave early. The talent pool for any specialised brief is shallower than the deal pipeline that creates demand for it, and none of that can be compressed once the brief is urgent without compromising on candidate quality or fit.
02. the groundwork to do before you call a recruiter.
It is not uncommon for us to see the drag on a recruitment process come from the employer side rather than from a shallow talent pool or candidates dragging their feet. This has nothing to do with motivation or effort on the hiring manager’s part; it’s simply a lack of forward planning coming back to bite them. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Before a brief is ready to run, an employer needs at least the bare minimum mapped:
A position description in draft. Not perfect, but true to the role. The responsibilities, the reporting line, the projects and scope.
The reason the role exists. Backfill, growth, a new project phase, a capability gap. The why shapes the who, and it often has a critical impact on the timeline.
The type of person who fits the business. A step beyond skills and experience - the working style, the values, the kind of person who has succeeded in your team before.
Your EVP, the employee value proposition. What a candidate actually gets by joining you, beyond the salary. This is what they will weigh in the second-round interview, so it needs to be clear before you start.
That preparation is yours, not ours. We can shape it with you, and often do, but we cannot do it for you. When it is not done before the brief, every later step slows down behind it: the shortlist takes longer, the interviews drift, and the strongest candidates lose patience.
Get the bare minimum down before you call. From there, we work backwards into the role-specific detail together.
some roles need a longer head start than others.
Not every property role takes the same time to fill. Some categories run longer for structural reasons.
Senior roles, transactions, niche specialisations, and sales roles where the person is sitting on unpaid commission all take more time. The talent pool is smaller, notice periods are longer, and the right person is rarely moving casually.
The market changes the timeline too. In an active senior market we might have ten relevant candidates for a General Manager brief inside a week. In a quieter market the same brief takes eight weeks. The only way to know which one your role is, is to ask early.
03. forecast from your program, not your vacancies.
The strongest property hiring processes start with the project pipeline front of mind, not from a gap tha’s already opened.
You know what stage each of your projects is at. You know what is coming next (and what you hope will be coming but isn’t yet across the line). You know that the delivery phase will need a Development Manager with delivery experience, and that the planning phase needs someone who can see around the corner and deal with planning authorities without a meltdown.
If you forecast from there, the brief is half-written before it lands. We can be talking to the right people 12 weeks before you need to make an offer, instead of two weeks after you needed someone in the chair.
Reactive hiring still happens. People resign, projects accelerate, plans change. But if the fundamentals are already in place, the position descriptions, the EVP, the picture of who fits, then a reactive hire becomes a matter of ticking boxes rather than starting from zero.
if a role is contingent, say so.
The single most common pattern that breaks a process is the role that depends on something the client has not told us.
A site is being acquired. A project is mid due diligence. A funding decision is two weeks away. The brief is real, but conditional. We find the candidate, they are the right fit, they are ready to move. Then the contingency falls away, the deal does not land, and we have to walk back into a conversation we should never have started the way we did. By then the candidate has moved on, and their next conversation is already underway with someone else.
If a role is contingent, the answer is not to hold off briefing us. The answer is to brief us early and tell us it is contingent. We can plan around that. We can pace the process so the offer lands when the conditions resolve, and the candidate gets the truth of the timeline the whole way through.
The one thing we cannot do is rebuild trust with a candidate after they have been told a role is ready, and then learn that it is not.
the recruiter's job is education.
Most of the people we work with on the client side are not full-time hiring managers; they run property businesses. They have projects, deal pipelines, debt cycles, planning processes, and a hundred operational decisions a week. Recruitment is one piece of all of that, and not the piece they think about most.
So part of what we do is educate. The relationship we build with clients is, of course, about the live brief, but it’s also an ongoing conversation about how to hire well in property in the long run. The reason we call between briefs, share what we are seeing in the market, and publish guides like this one, is simple: the better-informed the employer, the better the hire.
the outcome: the right hire, on time, without the scramble.
When you start the conversation early, everything downstream gets easier. The brief is sharper. The shortlist is stronger. The candidate experience holds together, because no one is being rushed or told half a timeline. And the hire lands when your project actually needs it, not weeks after.
If you have a role coming up next quarter, we should already be talking. If you have a project entering a phase that will need a new hire, we should already be talking. If you have a contingent brief that might or might not become real, we should be talking about both scenarios now.
A whiff is enough.
Not sure when to start your next hire? Get in touch with Jeremy or Nikita for a chat about your hiring plan for the next quarter, and how far ahead you should be moving.
This is part one of our hiring playbook series for property employers. More parts to follow on briefing, interviewing, and closing the right candidate.