why we suggest you start the hiring process early | hiring playbook part 2.
What We’ll Cover.
01. What a single hour at the outset of a brief actually changes.
02. How proactive introductions work in practice, and what they can create.
03. What it looks like to treat recruitment as pipeline planning.
Most of the time, by the time a client calls us, they’re already behind. Not because they’re disorganised or unaware, but because running a property business means recruitment sits behind the project, the deal, the funding decision, the planning application. It matters, but it rarely feels urgent until it does.
This piece is about what changes when you flip that order.
01. what one hour at the outset actually saves.
Walk through a standard hiring process from the inside. We meet with you, understand the brief, go to market. Candidates come through. You review, you interview, you decide whether to bring them back. There might be a second round. There might be a change of mind. That sequence takes weeks, even when everything runs smoothly, and most processes don’t.
Now back up to the start. An hour with us before any of that, at the point where the role is still half-formed, changes the shape of everything downstream. It means we know who we’re looking for before we start, which in turn means we’re filtering for that person in every conversation we have. The shortlist we bring you is targeted, not exploratory.
The upfront investment is a single conversation. The return is a process that does not start from zero.
This is not a novel approach in professional services. You do not engage an engineer in the week you need one on site. You bring them into the pipeline early because their expertise is upstream of the deliverable. A planner, a surveyor, a project manager: they all come in at the point where their input shapes the outcome, not at the point where the outcome is already late.
Recruitment sits in the same category. The hire you need in Q3 should be a conversation we are having in Q1. Not because we need three months to run a search, but because the three months we have changes what we can find for you.
02. how proactive introductions work, and what they can create.
Our job, day to day, is to speak with candidates: meet them, understand what they want, understand the kind of environment where they do their best work. That is ongoing, regardless of whether we have an open brief on our desk or not.
When we know a client's business well, those candidate conversations become something more than market intelligence. They become a matching exercise running in the background.
There are clients we work with who have said to us in passing, almost offhand: in six months, I might need someone with a background in this area. That single comment is often enough. We already have the candidate relationship. We make an introduction before the role is confirmed. The client takes the meeting. They see the fit. In some cases, that introduction is what creates the role. The business realises a capability it had not yet articulated. Or the person is clearly the right hire, and the role is built around them.
Whole business divisions have come from that process. Several of them, for clients we have worked with for years.
The clients this works for share one characteristic: they’re open to the conversation before the role is defined. They trust the introduction enough to have a coffee. They don’t need a finished position description to sit down and listen.
That openness is what makes proactive recruitment possible. Without it, we can still run a strong process when a brief arrives. But the ceiling on what we can deliver is lower because we’re working from the brief, not ahead of it.
03. treating recruitment as part of the pipeline.
There is a way of thinking about external recruitment that treats it like a procurement category. You have a need, you put in a request, someone fulfils it. That model works for commodities, but it simply doesn’t map across for senior hires in a specialised market, where the right person is usually already employed somewhere, probably not actively looking, often sitting on a commission or bonus that ties them to their current role for another quarter.
The property businesses in Melbourne that hire consistently well tend to think about recruitment differently.
They treat us the way they treat other consultancies they engage: with the expectation that the relationship has value between briefs, not only during them.
They brief us on where the business is heading. They tell us what they might need in six months. They take the calls we make when we have someone they should meet, even when there is no vacancy open.
In return, those clients get more than a search. They get a recruiter who already knows their business when the next brief arrives. They get introductions that happen before the role is scoped. They get a shortlist that starts warm.
They’re also at the front of our mind when we meet someone exceptional. We will be direct about this: when we know a client will take a proactive conversation seriously, that client gets those conversations first. Not as a policy decision, but as a natural consequence of a relationship that works in both directions. The clients who are open to us are the ones we can do the most for.
the question of fees.
Recruitment fees can feel significant in isolation. In context, they are a fraction of what the right hire generates for a business.
We’ve placed people who have gone on to save (and make) their employers millions. We’ve made introductions that seeded teams and divisions that didn’t exist before. The question isn’t whether the fee is affordable, it’s whether the hire is right. And the hires that are most likely to be right are the ones that started early, with enough time to find the right person rather than accept whoever is available when the pressure is highest.
Starting early is how you avoid the second outcome.
the takeway.
If you have a role coming up in the next quarter, we should already be talking. If you have a sense of where your business is heading and the kind of person you might need, that is enough to start a conversation. We don’t need a finished job description. We need the rough shape of what you’re building.
Get in touch to talk through your hiring plan for the next six months, and what starting early actually looks like in practice.
This is part two of our hiring playbook series for property employers. Part one covers how far ahead to start and the internal groundwork to do before you call a recruiter.