Everyone knows what facilities management is but few truly understand how to hire for it in terms of choosing the right candidates. It is why so many facilities are managed poorly. It’s not that it’s an impossible task, it’s simply that the right candidate wasn’t hired. The need for quality in facilities management is significant, so it requires a specific skill set to hire for the position as well. This involves hiring a facilities management recruitment firm.

The stronger the grasp of what facilities management entails, the easier it will be to hire a particular type of person that has all of the right skills. There are what’s considered hard skills and soft skills to look for. Typically, a company will look for one or the other, not both, which is why they aren’t getting the quality that they need.

The hard skills include such things as spatial planning, carpentry and engineering principles. The more a person understands plumbing, electrical and everything else will be beneficial to the overall management of the facilities themselves.

Further, there are soft skills that must also be included. Just about every skilled tradesman can handle the hard skills, but the softer ones include customer relations, financial control, time management and much more. These are where a college education will come in to play.

There is a recurring theme in facilities management recruitment which is why it’s hard to get quality. The people right out of school have all of the soft skills covered. They are knowledgeable about what needs to get done and they have the customer relations to make sure that the client is happy. Unfortunately, they don’t have the hands on experience to actually fix most of the problems that could go wrong with a facility.

This is where a recruitment firm can close the gap. The need for quality is important because it be what keeps a company making money and a client happy enough to keep renewing the contract over and over again. Closing this gap can be difficult, which is why finding a recruiter with a deep knowledge of facilities management is absolutely critical to a company’s success. If the quality isn’t there, in one skill or another, there will be glitches in the performance that will lead to the demise of the facilities or the contract – whichever comes first. Either way, it won’t be a position that any company wants to find themselves in.

The right balance can make a significant difference. While no one can know for sure who the absolute right person for the job is, there are certainly ways of narrowing the field to eliminate many of the problems that could arise before they have the opportunity to hurt business.