00:00

Kylie Davis

Welcome to the Prop Tech podcast. It's Kylie Davis here and I'm delighted to be your host as we explore the brave new world where technology and real estate collide. It's so great to have you here and to share stories of innovation and opportunity across real estate, property and building services. The aim of each episode is to introduce listeners to a Proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible across how we design, build, buy, sell, rent and invest in property and all of the associated behavior and activities around that. Now, none of this would be possible without our sponsors. A big shout out to the Direct Connect team, making moving, easy, dynamic methods the innovators behind the forms, live and Real works forms, and the Proptech Association of Australia. Thank you for your support of the podcast. 

00:55

Kylie Davis

My guest in this episode is Glenn Marlin, the property director at Capstone Recruitment, one of Australia's most established recruitment firms across the property and Proptech space. Getting your people right is absolutely essential in Proptech, and indeed, in any business, you need to attract a team that has both the skills and the temperament to grow with you and help take your company to the next level. In this episode, Glenn and I discuss the current employment landscape, the common mistakes that Proptechs make when hiring staff, and how to avoid them. Plus, the recruitment industry was one of the first to be disrupted by technology, with job websites among the first platforms to monetize digital through the posting of job ads. Yet we still have recruitment firms who specialize in delivering service and expert knowledge. There's some great insights for the future of real estate in this episode as well. 

01:45

Kylie Davis

So, here to tell us all about it, Glenn Marland. Welcome to the Prop Tech podcast. 

01:50

Glenn Marland

Thank you for the invitation. 

01:51

Kylie Davis

Yeah, it's great to have you here because I'm really curious and wanting to dig into this whole ever changing space of Prop Tech and property recruitment. First of all, I'm going to make you sit through the same kind of torture I put every guest through. What is the Capstone elevator pitch? 

02:11

Glenn Marland

Our elevator pitch is capstone is Australia's premier property recruitment business. We have about 15 years of focus in the property space purely for recruitment. It's pretty unique in the market, I guess, the domain that we operate in. 

02:33

Kylie Davis

Awesome. Very well done. I'd have only got to one or two floors this way. That's fantastic. What are the kind of services that you guys are doing and how is Prop Tech now part of your scope? 

02:47

Glenn Marland

The services are pretty much the same as most recruitment businesses. It'll be permanent, executive search or temporary kind of labor, which is sometimes illustrated as interim or something like that. The introduction to technology into our recruitment business has been pretty organic. I was hired a few years ago, or nearly four now, and that was off at the growing demand within property and I guess where technology is starting to overlay most of those business functions and the need for technology personnel to accommodate. 

03:32

Kylie Davis

Glenn, how is traditional property recruitment changing? Are traditional companies looking for more tech people? 

03:43

Glenn Marland

Yes, some are adopting the change better than others. The bigger, more institutional businesses seem to have just come to terms with it's going to be now a cost. Things like data and cyber and those areas within a business where there's financial risk, they have just adopted it and started making hires in the technology space where the technology teams have grown and I guess gotten bigger. The smaller ones are probably a bit more resistant or uneducated of the risk or whatever is driving that resistance. The larger ones seem to be adopting it and it's the changes like cyber, data, automation, those areas are driving a lot of the change. Even in finance. They're using data and automation now for finance functions. Technology is really creeping in all areas. 

04:54

Kylie Davis

What roles are they looking for? Like CTOs or head of security or. 

04:59

Glenn Marland

What'S the yeah, so lately there has been a bit of change in that project space. Where people have adopted a new technology, they need to implement or integrate that into their businesses. A lot of prop techs are offering some cloud solution to facilities management or whatever that might be, and the board level roles or their non executive level roles where they have technology advisors in those businesses and then delivery resources to implement and integrate those solutions. That's what the demand is coming up. Sort of coming about, yeah. 

05:42

Kylie Davis

I have lots of questions in this space. One of the issues around the rise of technology inside property and real estate that you're seeing inside the traditional images industry? One of the issues that companies are being asked to adopt more technology and to make improvements or efficiencies, but then at the same time and so the savings that they're getting out of those efficiencies, they're actually having to offset by hiring people to help manage it. Is that a conversation? 

06:19

Glenn Marland

Yeah, I hosted a CIO, so that's Chief Information Officer, not Investment Chief Information Officer roundtable roughly around about twelve months specifically for property, and that it was to discuss how to generate revenue from technology. It's often seen as a cost center. It does address kind of what you're saying there where we need technology to improve processes to save money, but to do that we need to spend money on those resources. How big is the saving, is it worth it? Those questions come about and the CFOs and the CEO executive suite are asking, well, why bother? Chief Information Officer, which often reports into the finance function, has to justify these investments. The conversation very much is how do we get more of a realized benefit than what we're seeing on the surface. Okay, we need to improve this process. How do we then capitalize on that and even turn it into a revenue stream or a profit center as opposed to a cost center? 

07:36

Glenn Marland

Those conversations definitely been had. 

07:38

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Okay. 

07:39

Glenn Marland

Some have solutions. 

07:40

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Why would a company decide to use a recruitment agency rather than just shoving it onto the job, ad onto LinkedIn or Seek? I guess you get asked that all the time, right? 

07:53

Glenn Marland

Again, some have come to terms with it. It's even our own business, believe it or not. Recruitment agencies use recruitment agencies to find recruiters for themselves. 

08:04

Kylie Davis

So complicated. 

08:06

Glenn Marland

It's actually how I found my first job in recruitment. So we call it rec to rec. The rationale is you've got a job to do and you're an expert at your job and not an expert at finding people or finding the right people. Importantly. There are people out there that spend their whole day mapping out specific areas within a market. Data analysis and all the different flavors that analysis can come in even within data. That takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to understand the market, the trends, where to find people that are appropriate, culture, fit for permanent or contract rates, all those kinds of considerations just take time and people don't have it. It's an industry that is in the trillions. It's not really having to justify its existence so much anymore. It's justifying the costs that are the harder bit. 

09:11

Glenn Marland

The hiring managers aren't necessarily in control of those costs or the budgets for that. Justifying that upward is the challenge for them. We often have to help with that justification, saying, okay, here's a person that can help us find the right team at times. The costs associated with hiring the wrong person or the best of a bad bunch far outweigh the cost of a recruitment consultant. 

09:49

Kylie Davis

Can we unpick some of those costs? What are the risks of hiring the wrong person? Have you got any data or insights into that? 

09:57

Glenn Marland

Yeah, not to share right now, but there are a lot of experiences. One that comes to mind straight away is the cost of replacing a person. There are often people in this kind of market as well who maybe have been with the business for two or three years. They've been upskilled, maybe have got an understanding of some bespoke technologies that are used. They are able to now go and get a new job with an additional 2030, 40, 50 grand we're seeing. Let's say that salary that they're leaving is $150,000 a year. They're going to get another 30. To replace that person, then they're not spending $150,000. They have to come up anyway. They're going to get somebody at that original $150,000 worth of experience because that's the new price point. They're missing out on two, three years worth of training. Actually, if they want to get the like for like, replacement, it's going to cost upwards of 200K. 

11:06

Glenn Marland

The cost of retaining people is probably the one thing that I'll promote more than anything to customers. Retention is the biggest hiring badly or poor decision making processes around. Hiring definitely a problem, which I'll talk about, but retention is the best thing for any business in a growth spurt, the tight market or the need to hurry a process up because everyone screams. If you want to hire the best person, you got to move fast, which is often a mistake, is mistaken for, I've just got to hire the best person that's here in front of me, the three or the six or whatever it is that's applied. Those bad decisions, they have impacts on culture within the team. If you're trying to grow, what kind of message are you sending by hiring people to the existing team? There's a whole range of different considerations that hiring managers need to make when hiring. 

12:13

Glenn Marland

That's why I think the agent in a true partnership is able to understand what the business is trying to achieve culturally and from an outcomes perspective and go to market and really kind of spend time trying to understand that and what the market has to offer. Because bad hires we've all worked with. Am I allowed to swear? 

12:39

Kylie Davis

Yeah, look, we're very swearing on the podcast. 

12:45

Glenn Marland

We've all worked with pains in the a** or people that are problematic and they just performance and it snowballs. Bad hires, it's not saying that they're bad people, they're just not fit. Yeah, so and it's tough in a tight market because people just want to get a job done too. So there's these conflicting priorities. An agent should be able to provide good candidates that match the initiatives and the brief and the culture of an organization. 

13:22

Kylie Davis

How do you avoid that? You've hiring at a period in time. You've got your short list of candidates from the people who applied. How do you get around or solve that problem of. 

13:38

Glenn Marland

It? 

13:39

Kylie Davis

Says Peter Brewer would say the cream of the crap. If it's not the right, how do if it's just timing or if there's something wrong in your job description or how do you get to the bottom of all of that? 

13:52

Glenn Marland

Yeah, it's a good question. For us as an agent, it's just spending time on the phone or meeting people, and that's the point I made earlier. It just takes time to do. 

14:08

Kylie Davis

It's not linear, it's not something that you post the job ad and then two weeks later you start to review. 

14:13

Glenn Marland

And then it can happen really quickly. It can happen over a period of two, three weeks. It's a bit of elbow grease, I suppose, talking to people and understanding what motivates them and all those cliche questions, but asking them and finding out in a real, genuine way of an interest, showing interest in the humans that you're talking to. That's the hiring managers and the candidates, because it can go the other way. You can put a candidate in a rubbish company. Thanks a lot for that. There's a hospital pass and it's happened to me in the past, and you feel horrible as an agent. It's a really good candidate. I thought it was a good job, but it wasn't, so it goes both ways and it just takes time. There's no real kind of shortcut or silver bullet to say, okay, how do I get the best candidate for this job every time? 

15:17

Kylie Davis

Due diligence. 

15:19

Glenn Marland

Yeah, it's attracting good talent is hard. It's really hard. In this market especially, it's about being proactive. You need to be out constantly. Association does a really good job. These networking events and awards nights and those kinds of things. If you're going there and you're sitting at your table and it's an awards night and you're hoping for your award and you don't get it and you're there and you're gone within a couple of hours, it's a real missed opportunity to meet people and understand what's going on. It's a really social component when you're hiring. It's about people. So you've got to be out talking. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is, and some people don't want to do that. 

16:11

Speaker 5

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17:15

Speaker 5

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17:32

Kylie Davis

What is the market like at the moment for hiring? There's so much going on, especially in prop tech at the moment. Is it hard to hire? Is it easy to hire? Are there lots of people out there? What's the lay of the land? 

17:47

Glenn Marland

The question I've been discussing with a number of different companies and customers lately. If you look at it like a seasonal summer, autumn, winter, that kind of thing. At the moment I think we're in between like a summer and a winter where there's either lots of vacancies and no candidates or lots of candidates and no vacancies. We're in the middle somewhere. Somewhere like an autumn or a spring where there are candidates and the candidates that are in the market at the moment, there seems to be an influx of people who have potentially taken advantage of a really candidate short. Market and taken that 50 grand a year extra, oversold themselves into a role that they probably weren't ready for, or the company maybe thought that they didn't have to train them up or something like that. They found themselves in hot water or in a really uncomfortable position and are back on the market. 

18:47

Glenn Marland

Not saying that they're bad candidates, but they just tried to capitalize and so there's a lot of that kind of influx. I would say that's at the sub 200 up that 1000 $200,000 mark, that real mid range and there's a lot of activity there. North of 200. $250,000 is a pretty consistent market, and it has been throughout the last couple of years. I think anything north of 250,000, that is senior leadership level, there's a more considered approach to selecting a new job. Until they've achieved something called they've got unfinished business somewhere, they won't leave it's too big of a risk. That mid range. That's sort of like an hourglass. That bit there is really tight still but the vacancies haven't really slowed. There are a bit more candidates in the market that are appropriate. The difficult thing is they've gone from, let's say again, one hundred and fifty k to two hundred. 

19:52

Glenn Marland

They're like, I still want 200,000, but I don't want that job anymore. They're talking them back. There is a bit of this negotiation now and finding out truly what is what you have to them. Yeah, and that's a shock, but yeah, it's still very much in the candidate favor in my opinion. 

20:11

Kylie Davis

Right. What jobs are out there that we talked about CTOs and CIOs and things like that. They're all kind of sea levels. What is happening in that one to 200 range? What kind of tech jobs are we seeing? When we first started talking about six months ago, you couldn't find a developer for love or money because they'd all been sucked up. What's the status on that these days? 

20:38

Glenn Marland

It's a fickle market. I don't mean any offense to developers out there, but it is a fickle market and we've seen actually some interesting stuff with automation like Chat, JPT and all these kinds of things that are able to write code for them. I was talking to a candidate and they actually had three day rate contracts if that makes sense. So they're working for three different companies. There was no conflict, but they were able to do a lot of programming or development of CRMs and they were using automation tools to write their code. They're cashing in large and they might be like post grad four or five years. They're using technology to their advantage for obviously technology. It's amazing to see some of the pressure around the tight market has reduced. I think because of this kind of I can do two jobs here or I can do three jobs and they automate a lot of stuff which I think is quite cool. 

21:44

Kylie Davis

Well, they know how to do that stuff, right? 

21:48

Glenn Marland

Yeah, very much. That developer market is probably softened a bit. Other roles like engineering, cloud engineering, data and cyber, those one to 200 people where they're doing analysis of those kinds of things, where are we, what's our exposure? Different rules that the government may impose around like essential eight for cyber, they're all getting a baseline of where we're at and what we need to do. There's a lot of demand in that analysis domain and that then flows into projects. We'll see PMS Bas Architects that can do the design change. Management is pretty big at the moment. This project delivery space, that's essentially what I would badged it all up as reset and all the resources needed to do that. But development is still here. I'm seeing a lot of the demand needing to be onshore. Good communication skills, able to translate technology to people. In layman's terms, testing seems to still be outsourced, or offshore even. 

23:14

Glenn Marland

It seems to be not something that people keep internally or where the cost of responsibility for the management of those individuals. So testing still seems to be outside. Again, that's a more general brushstroke of a broad brushstroke of the market. What I know of it, technology specific things do tend to influence that. Like a ServiceNow, for example. ServiceNow is a platform that a lot of companies are starting to subscribe to. That stuff is kept internally for whatever reason. I'm seeing a lot of that still needs to be onshore. 

23:55

Kylie Davis

What packages are we seeing since COVID and working remotely and things like that? Has that changed what people are looking for in their packages? Apart from just the red hot cash, cold hard cash? 

24:08

Glenn Marland

I don't think it's got much to do with the job market. I think it's got to do with external stuff, inflation and interest rates and all that stuff. People are just having they need more money, they're working harder and things are more expensive. It kind of feels like they're working harder and they're still and they're not standing still. Yeah, they're just churning. It seems like that's driving a lot of stuff. People like I've got kids in private school and everything's going up and going from when we got our mortgage not long ago and it was less just under 2%. Everybody's up at near five or something now on a variable. Some people aren't dealing with that very well. They're looking to move jobs purely to fill that gap. 

25:01

Kylie Davis

What's your advice to employers around that? 

25:06

Glenn Marland

Yeah, our organization I think, is really good in that sense and it doesn't necessarily financially help, but the stress that it has on people's lives and at home can be lightened by employers. This is I think there was some innovation kind of trend to what we're talking about around Prop Tech, but the innovation around how you look after people in your business and retention, like I said before, is really important. Really important. The things like, okay, go and do something like a charity day and put things into perspective. There are people out there that are struggling probably more than you. Not to say that helps, but it puts things into perspective and often can to make the home life less tense. That helps in turn your retention and then your costs around recruitment. Little things like parking or something if a company can wear that cost of a parking arrangement and save someone all different kinds of things, we've seen because unlimited annual leave is pointless if someone's got no money to spend on a holiday. 

26:18

Kylie Davis

Yeah, true. 

26:19

Glenn Marland

That's often people are advertised unlimited annual leave but the job still needs to be done and they've got no money to spend on a holiday anyway. Yeah, what's the point? 

26:29

Speaker 5

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27:14

Kylie Davis

Are we seeing things like there was a big period there where beanbags and football tables and ping pong stole the rage. What kind of culture are people looking for these days? 

27:29

Glenn Marland

Yeah, it's different. It's really different. There are people that go into offices for they all have their own reasons, I don't think. Not one size fits all. Some like the peace and quiet and getting away from kids, young children. 

27:49

Kylie Davis

Yeah. 

27:49

Glenn Marland

Some like doing it just for meetings, some like the social component and they're going in on a Thursday afternoon or a Friday so they can go and hang out and meet the team and all that stuff. I think an organization that can accommodate a bit of it all. I know it's a tough ask, but you want some quiet space, you want some social stuff or just a meeting room for a couple of days where you can run a workshop or something. That's what needs to be available and probably is something that the property industry in general is probably considering getting people back into the offices. Everyone was talking about that. I don't know. 

28:33

Kylie Davis

Yeah, but no one wants to come back to the office to sit at a row of desks like a battery hen. 

28:37

Glenn Marland

Right.