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NAI Global CEO Jay Olshonsky on CRE Labor Market: “Recruiting Never Really Turns Off” (VIDEO)
NAI Global president and CEO Jay Olshonsky is now in his 38th year in commercial real estate, an industry he joined upon graduating college at a time when interest rates were approaching 20%. He sees the current pandemic-driven environment of lower transaction volume as a time when services firms need to take a hard look at revenues and expenses—and make adjustments when necessary. At the same time, though, “that has also created a lot of opportunity for people to move around.”
In a wide-ranging video conversation with Connect Media CEO Daniel Ceniceros, Olshonsky discussed recruitment and retention on the one hand, and marketing yourself as an employee on the other. On both sides of the equation, some aspects of the process are different now, while other principles have remained largely the same over the past four decades.
“Like it’s always been, recruiting never really turns off,” said Olshonsky. “You have to be recruiting all the time.”
For a prospective job candidate, achieving any degree of success means getting out there, as it always has. Exactly what getting out there entails today has evolved, though, especially amid a pandemic that mitigates against traditional face-to-face networking. Accordingly, Olshonsky offered guidance on how a candidate can effectively convey his or her message to recruiters outside of the time-honored channels.
If the job-seeking process has changed over time, so too has the employee-seeking process. Neither traditional backgrounds nor traditional demographics are the rule now. When Olshonsky and his team are looking for the best candidate to fill a particular role, “We really don’t have a preconceived notion of what that person looks like,” said Olshosnky. “Some people say, ‘you’ve got to have experience in commercial real estate.’ I’m not so sure about that anymore.”
Click on the video below to see the full 37-minute conversation between Olshonsky and Ceniceros.
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