If you had to hire a maintenance employee lately, chances are it wasn’t easy. Over the past few years, hiring in general has grown more difficult. Getting any useful information from past employers is nearly impossible unless you have a good relationship with that employer and can get them to talk off the record. Virtually every employer has been cautioned to avoid giving out anything but the most basic information (e.g. job title and dates of employment) for fear of being sued by someone. Lower unemployment has also created more competition for new hires and an upward pressure on wages.
Hiring maintenance employees in particular has always been more difficult simply because of the nature of the job. Even with advancing technology, building maintenance remains primarily a manual job requiring skills that aren’t easily measured by the typical employer. Saying you can handle electrical or carpentry work doesn’t mean you actually can. Most employers of building maintenance staff – except, perhaps, the largest – lack the ability to test for mechanical skills.
That’s why a few years ago NCHM introduced its Maintenance Technical Aptitude Test (MTAT). MTAT is an online test designed to assess what a job candidate really knows about the typical tasks performed at a residential property – e.g, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, appliances, carpentry, and decorating. If, for example, an applicant can’t identify a photo of a refrigerator evaporator the odds are he or she can’t repair that refrigerator either. (Click here to learn more about MTAT.)
While tools like MTAT make the hiring process easier, there are some real and potential challenges that are conspiring to make the task more difficult. Among the real challenges are:
Skilled tradespersons are aging and retiring. Across the country, electricians, carpenters, plumbers and others with mechanical skills are getting old and retiring at ever increasing rates. And the number of new, mechanically-inclined workers coming into the trades isn’t keeping up with demand.
There remains a strong bias towards college education and away from technical training. In the face of growing shortages of workers with mechanical skills and increasing wages, there has been somewhat of a push to expand technical schools and similar training opportunities. However, there still is a cultural bias towards encouraging young people to seek college degrees as opposed to technical ones. That’s unfortunate since it is often easier to find a good lawyer than it is a good plumber!
Construction is booming. That’s good for workers but, again, puts a damper on the building maintenance labor pool. When the construction industries retracted in the mid 2000s, many of the displaced workers found employment in apartment maintenance – albeit at lower wages. Now with construction booming, particularly in the multi-family sector, even marginally qualified workers are finding employment in the construction trades at higher wages.
As if these real threats weren’t enough, enter a potential one that might prove to be even more detrimental: the anti-immigrant movement.
Regardless of your politics, there is no question that increased barriers to foreign workers entering (or for that matter, staying) in the United States, if they occur, will have an impact. And despite the media’s recent preoccupation with jobs at the high-end of the pay scale (in high-tech industries for example), we can expect that these impacts will be disproportionately felt in manual labor jobs; jobs that are either directly in the housing industry or in other industries that compete for similarly skilled workers. And do not make the mistake of thinking these impacts will be felt only in the border states or large urban areas. Increasingly, employers in rural communities and far from the borders are finding it more difficult to hire Americans, particularly for manual labor positions, and thus are turning to both documented and, unfortunately, undocumented foreign workers to close the gap.
There are those who argue that slowing or reversing the use of foreign workers will benefit American workers and that may be true. But it will also make the task and cost of hiring more difficult. Again, I’m not making a case for or against the use of foreign workers, I am simply pointing to another factor that very likely is going to make the job of hiring maintenance staff even more challenging in the future.
There are other factors that may also be at play. Some point to a declining work ethic. Others bemoan the difficulty of finding workers who can pass a drug test. Still others complain about the lack of basic math skills among job candidates. How much these factors are negatively impacting our industry is debatable. But what is not in question is the fact that hiring maintenance staff is going to be more difficult in the future.
What can a property or company do to help itself? First, if you employ more than just a few maintenance staff, look to “grow your own.” That is, look for the younger worker who may lack the skills or experience but has a good basic work ethic and a willingness to learn. Team that person up with one of your more experienced maintenance people and charge the experienced worker with the added role of mentor. A little extra compensation and some recognition for the mentor will help. Yes, you may ultimately lose such new workers once they get trained, but odds are they will stay with you longer and contribute more if you give them a break when others won’t.
Another thing to consider is to look for employees in places not traditionally a source for building maintenance workers. For example, those coming out of the military often possess a lot of the attributes we are looking for in maintenance staff but don’t always know about our industry or how to access it.
Of course, higher wages help, but that’s a function of what your property can afford. In the end though, you get what you pay for if you are lucky!
There are other things companies can do to give themselves an advantage in the competition for workers, such as offering flex-time and career development opportunities. It’s likely no one strategy will prove decisive but it’s equally likely doing nothing will put a company at a distinct disadvantage.