A good hiring process is worth designing carefully. At senior level in real estate, the cost of getting it wrong — a mis-hire, a long vacancy, a candidate who looked right in two conversations and wasn’t — is significant enough to justify real thought about how people are assessed before an offer is made.
But process done badly can lose the very person it was designed to assess. The difference between process done well and process done badly is usually less about what candidates are asked to do, and more about when they’re asked to do it, and how their response is read.
Match the assessment to the level
A scenario workshop — candidates working through real situations under some pressure — can be a genuinely useful tool. For junior to mid-level roles, where the question is how someone thinks and whether they can handle pace, it makes a lot of sense.
At senior level the question is different. Judgement, commercial instincts, whether experience maps onto a specific context — these are harder to assess in a structured exercise. A case study or a business plan, something that asks a candidate to engage with the actual situation and bring a considered point of view to it, tends to give more useful signal.
The format of an assessment should reflect what the role actually requires. If it doesn’t, the wrong things end up being tested.
Sequence matters, especially for approached candidates
There’s a meaningful difference between someone who has applied for a role and someone who has been approached for it. The person who applied has already decided they’re interested. Asking them to put significant effort into an assessment early in the process is reasonable — they’ve signalled they want the job.
The person who’s been approached hasn’t made that decision yet. Asking them to produce a business plan or complete a technical test before they’ve properly understood the role, met the team, or felt genuinely excited about the opportunity is asking for investment before there’s been any reason to invest.
Get the sequencing wrong and it doesn’t just feel onerous — it signals that the business hasn’t thought about the candidate’s perspective. The best senior candidates, who usually have options, will notice that.
Reading the signal correctly
When a candidate pushes back on a process step, there are two very different things it might mean.
It might mean they’re not really that interested. The process step is the moment that revealed it — they were never going to lean in, and the ask gave them a polite way to step back. That’s useful information.
Or it might mean life is simply getting in the way. A holiday, a diary that won’t flex, a timing issue that has nothing to do with how interested they actually are.
The mistake is treating both signals the same way. Working out which one it is — whether the obstacle is logistics or genuine disengagement — is usually where a good recruiter adds real value. If it’s logistics, there’s often a way to get what’s needed without making the process unnecessarily hard. If it’s lack of interest, flexing on the process step won’t change anything.
The process is there to support a good decision. It works best when it’s held firmly enough to be useful, and loosely enough to respond to what’s actually being learned about the person on the other side of it.
