Hiring maintenance technicians: the job posting is why you get no applicants

The multifamily maintenance labor market has been tight for years, and most operators respond by posting the same job description faster.

Read one of those postings as a tech reads it. Twenty bullet points of requirements. "Competitive pay." "Must be available for on-call rotation." No number, no rotation frequency, no indication of how many units one person covers. A tech with any experience closes it, because the parts that matter to them are the parts that were left out.

Three numbers decide whether a tech applies

Every experienced maintenance technician evaluates a posting on the same three things, and most postings answer none of them.

Pay, as a range with a number in it. "Competitive" is read as below market, because a posting with a good number in it prints the number. If you cannot publish a range, you are competing against every posting that can.

On-call frequency. One week in four is a job. One week in two is a reason to leave. A posting that says "on-call rotation required" without saying how often is read as the worst case, which is usually correct.

Units per tech. This is the number that tells a tech what the days will be like. 100 to 150 units per tech is workable. 250 is a queue that never empties. A posting that hides it is hiding the reason the position is open.

Publish those three and your applicant volume changes before you touch anything else about the job.

Cut the requirements list to what you would actually reject over

The twenty-bullet requirements list is a filter working against you, because it filters on the wrong axis. Every additional requirement removes qualified applicants who self-select out, and removes none of the unqualified ones, who apply regardless.

What actually predicts a good multifamily tech:

HVAC competence, ideally EPA 608 certified, because it is the highest-volume skilled category and the most expensive to contract out.

Basic plumbing and electrical, at the level of a fill valve, a disposal, a breaker, and a fixture.

Appliance diagnosis, at the level of deciding repair versus replace correctly.

Willingness to talk to residents in their homes, which is a real skill and rarely listed.

A driver's license and a clean enough record to be on the property.

That is five items. The other fifteen bullets on the standard posting are either downstream of these or things you would train.

The interview should be a walk, not a conversation

An hour across a desk tells you how someone interviews. Forty-five minutes walking a property tells you how they think about buildings.

Take the candidate through a vacant unit mid-turn and a mechanical room. Then ask four questions.

"Walk me through diagnosing this unit not cooling." You are listening for a sequence: check thermostat, check filter, check the outdoor unit, check the charge. A tech who jumps straight to "it needs refrigerant" is guessing, and guessing on HVAC is expensive.

"Which of these do you fix and which do you replace?" Pointing at an actual water heater or disposal. This is the judgment that controls your capital spend, and it is unteachable in an interview but very visible in one.

"You are in a unit and the resident is angry about a repair from last month that was not yours. What do you do?" The answer separates techs who de-escalate from techs who explain that it was not their ticket. The first kind saves you renewals.

"What is on your truck right now?" A tech who can list their standard stock has run their own queue before. A tech who says "whatever they give me" has been managed rather than trusted.

The maintenance supervisor role is a different job and gets posted as the same one

Worth separating, because conflating them is how portfolios end up with a supervisor who is really a senior tech.

A maintenance supervisor's actual work is scheduling, vendor management, scoping turns, approving purchases, documenting high-risk work, and developing two or three techs. Wrench time is a minority of the week, and a supervisor still doing 80% wrench time is a signal the property is understaffed rather than that the supervisor is diligent.

So the posting should ask for judgment about sequencing and money, plus the ability to write a scope somebody else can execute. A posting that lists only trade skills gets you the best technician in the applicant pool, promoted into a coordination job they were not hired for, which is one of the more common ways good techs get burned out.

Pay is the whole retention story, and the schedule is second

The reasons techs leave line up almost exactly against the reasons they do not apply. Compensation below market, on-call load, and units per tech.

The one thing that improves without a budget increase is the visibility of the work. A tech whose completed volume, response time, and callback rate are recorded has an argument for a raise, and a supervisor has an argument to give it. In our own portfolio, 94% of techs adopted a system that made their work visible, which is higher than most software adoption because the visibility was in their interest rather than only in management's.

Also being straight about what a maintenance platform does not fix: if you pay below market and run one week on-call in two, no software retains that tech. Measurement makes a good compensation decision possible. It does not substitute for one.

Rewrite one posting this week

Take your open maintenance tech req. Add the pay range, the on-call frequency, and the units per tech. Cut the requirements list to five.

Then count applicants over two weeks against the two weeks before.

What is your current units-per-tech number, and would you put it in the posting?