Two things are true in real estate hiring at the moment, at the same time. Clients tell me they can’t find the right person for a role that isn’t even that unusual. And candidates tell me they’re applying to job after job and hearing nothing back at all. Both are genuinely frustrated. Neither is wrong. It isn’t really a shortage of talent, and it isn’t really a shortage of jobs either. It’s a matching problem, and it’s worth understanding why, because the fix is different from what most people reach for first.
Where the client side goes wrong
Put a role up on a job board and you’ll get applications. Plenty of them. The trouble is who they’re from. A vague or overly broad job description brings in everyone who can convince themselves they might qualify, and in a tight market that’s a lot of people who genuinely don’t. You end up wading through CVs that have nothing to do with the role, trying to find the handful that do.
Meanwhile, the people who’d actually be brilliant at it usually aren’t the ones scrolling job boards. In real estate specifically, a lot of the strongest candidates are already in good roles, not actively looking, and simply never see the advert. They’re not being difficult. They’re just not where a standard job ad reaches.
So the paradox from the client side isn’t too few candidates. It’s the wrong candidates in large numbers, and the right ones nowhere in sight.
Where the candidate side goes wrong
From the other direction, a lot of genuinely capable people are applying broadly because targeted applications don’t feel like they’re working. If ten specific applications get no response, applying to thirty roughly-relevant ones starts to feel like better odds.
The problem is that this usually makes things worse, not better. A CV and a covering message that’s been tailored to nothing in particular reads as exactly that, and it gets filtered out just as fast as the ones from people who were never going to be right for it. On top of that, rigid requirements on the client side, five years in this exact sub-sector, this exact asset type, filter out people whose experience is genuinely transferable but doesn’t tick the literal box. A strong asset manager with the right instincts for a different property type gets screened out before anyone’s actually spoken to them.
The bit both sides miss
Neither problem gets solved by more volume. More applications from candidates doesn’t fix a broad, unclear brief. More CVs in a client’s inbox doesn’t fix the fact that the right people were never looking at the advert in the first place.
What actually closes the gap is specificity, on both sides. A brief that says clearly what the business actually needs, not a generic wish list, attracts fewer but far more relevant applications. And reaching people directly, rather than waiting for them to find an advert, gets you in front of candidates who were never going to apply cold, however good they are.
This is really what most of the value in real estate recruitment comes down to. Not finding candidates that don’t exist, and not generating more applications for the sake of it. It’s narrowing the brief down to what’s actually needed, and then going and finding the specific person who fits it, whether or not they were ever going to see the job ad.
If a search feels like it’s drowning in the wrong CVs, or a role has been up for weeks without the right person surfacing, that’s usually the signal worth paying attention to. Not a talent shortage. A sign the net’s been cast in the wrong shape.
