How Propertybase Built a Great Team

I had the pleasure of speaking with Propertybase Managing Director and Co-founder Max-Michael Mayer about the recruiting and hiring challenges that come along with market traction (with customers in more than 35 countries), large fund raising, and creating an awesome product. Propertybase is the leading CRM solution for Real Estate, and they are Now Hiring!

1. Who makes a good employee at Propertybase? What’s it like to work for Propertybase?

People who come on board with us have to own their work, and have the initiative to bring new ideas and projects to life. We work in a collaborative environment where you can get feedback and push ideas forward. This trait is expected and encouraged across the company, from interns to founders. We also have amazing work spaces that are filled with everything our team needs to feel inspired and productive. Our spaces are filled with billiard and fussball tables, window gardens, the best coffee, and we host tech meetups to keep us on top of our game, and highly connected to the community. Propertybase is a place people look forward to spending a majority of their day, and we like to make it easy to love your work.

2. What challenges were you facing in finding the talent you were looking for?
A big recruiting challenge is the corporate mindset. We’ve all worked in corporate organizations at one point or another, so we understand how the hierarchical system works. However, some candidates are brainwashed into believing they shouldn’t rock the boat, because they are taught not to. Finding candidates with an entrepreneurial outlook, as well as the skills and experience to drive Propertybase forward is challenging, but not impossible.

3. How did you come across SmartRecruiters and what was your first impression?

We had been looking for a solution for quite some time. Our company was at a crucial time when we needed to create a world class team… Fast! We were looking for a system that made publishing jobs to multiple platforms easy. In addition, we wanted to have a SaaS Solution that made responding to applicants efficient, without creating a complex HR infrastructure.

Bigger platforms couldn’t match our wish list, so we started researching startups, and that’s how we came across SmartRecruiters. We were extremely impressed with how they were going about changing the recruitment space, and completely related to the product vision. We’ve been sold ever since.

4. Max, you’ve given the team a lot of great feedback, what has impressed you with the growth of the product?

The SmartRecruiters team was really open to our feedback, and actually delivered solutions to problems the platform had in the early days. I could tell that the product management team were listening to customers, and continually improving the application. SmartRecruiters had a great customer service ethic, and have developed their product into a first-class application that simply gets better and better all the time.

5. How many hires have you made through SmartRecruiters?
Almost every single hire, over 2-3 offices, so approx. 30 hires…. So we’re very happy! Without SmartRecruiters we couldn’t have sifted through to real talent, which is like finding a needle in a haystack. Candidates are sometimes shocked at how quickly we get back to them. SmartRecruiters speeds up our response times, and shows where the blockers are in the process. This makes everyone involved accountable to giving an answer, scheduling the interview, and getting the candidate on board. It really just keeps everyone organised in the very collaborative HR process we have here at Propertybase.

6. What would you tell the next business about the hiring platform?

The key things we would say about SmartRecruiters is that it’s easy-to-use, has super fast setup, open positions are published to all major platforms, within minutes, and it speeds up the sharing of applications with your team and getting feedback.

Overall, the SmartRecruiters platform really shortens the hiring process, which is extremely important. Talented people are hard to find, and they don’t want to wait forever.

Max-Michael Mayer is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Propertybase – The Real Estate Desktop™, the leading Real Estate solution built entirely on the Force.com “software as a service” platform.