PeakMade Real Estate, a prominent property management company with a significant footprint across the United States and Canada, has fundamentally transformed its hiring ecosystem by adopting Workable, a leading applicant tracking system. This strategic move addresses the inherent complexities of managing recruitment across nearly 100 diverse properties and a workforce of approximately 950 associates, delivering a unified, efficient, and candidate-centric experience. The transition has not only streamlined internal workflows and empowered hiring managers with advanced tools but has also led to a remarkable increase in candidate engagement, significantly enhancing PeakMade’s ability to attract top talent in a competitive market.
PeakMade Real Estate: A Profile in Growth and Distributed Operations
Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, PeakMade Real Estate stands as a robust player in the property management sector, specializing in both student housing and multifamily communities. Its extensive portfolio spans nearly 30 U.S. states and Canada, encompassing a wide array of properties, each with its unique operational demands and, crucially, often its own ownership group. This distributed structure inherently creates a complex hiring environment, requiring a recruitment solution that can maintain consistency and visibility across disparate teams while adapting to localized needs.
The company’s rapid growth trajectory and expanding property portfolio necessitated a re-evaluation of its talent acquisition strategies. With approximately 950 associates, PeakMade’s hiring focus is broad, ranging from on-site property operations and facilities teams—roles critical to the day-to-day success of each community—to various corporate positions that support the overarching business strategy. The ability to efficiently recruit, onboard, and retain skilled professionals is paramount to sustaining service quality and driving expansion. The decentralized nature of their operations meant that any hiring solution had to facilitate seamless coordination among multiple stakeholders, from property managers to regional directors and corporate HR, ensuring alignment on hiring goals and a cohesive candidate experience. The property management industry, characterized by high employee turnover rates in operational roles and a constant need for skilled facilities and community management personnel, presents unique challenges in talent acquisition. PeakMade recognized that modernizing their approach was not just an option but a strategic imperative to maintain their competitive edge and support their ambitious growth.
The Pre-Workable Landscape: Navigating Manual Processes in a Digital Age
Before the integration of Workable, PeakMade Real Estate faced a myriad of challenges stemming from a largely manual and fragmented hiring process. The absence of a centralized, robust applicant tracking system meant that talent acquisition efforts were often characterized by inefficiencies, limited transparency, and considerable administrative burden. This archaic approach hindered their ability to attract and secure top talent effectively.
One of the most significant pain points was the manual dissemination of job postings. For a company managing nearly 100 properties, each potentially requiring multiple roles to be filled simultaneously, the process of manually posting vacancies across various job boards was not just time-consuming but also prone to inconsistencies and delays. Molly Blazer, Systems Compliance Analyst at PeakMade Real Estate, articulated this challenge clearly: "Before Workable, we had to manually post our roles across multiple job sites instead of doing it all with a click of a button." This manual effort diverted valuable resources from more strategic recruitment activities and slowed down the initial stages of the hiring pipeline, extending the time-to-hire significantly. Industry benchmarks suggest that companies without automated job posting capabilities spend up to 40% more time on administrative tasks related to job advertising, a burden PeakMade was acutely feeling.
Beyond job postings, the overall workflow suffered from a lack of integration and visibility. Coordinating candidates between multiple stakeholders—property managers, regional managers, and corporate HR—often involved a convoluted exchange of emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls. This fragmentation made it difficult for any single individual to gain a comprehensive overview of a candidate’s journey or the status of an open requisition. Hiring managers, the frontline evaluators of talent, often lacked easy, real-time access to candidate information, hindering their ability to make swift decisions and collaborate effectively with other team members involved in the hiring process. This lack of transparency often led to duplicated efforts, missed communications, and a prolonged decision-making cycle, all of which contributed to a suboptimal experience for both internal teams and prospective employees.
Furthermore, communication with candidates was a critical area for improvement. In today’s competitive talent landscape, a smooth and responsive candidate experience is not just a nicety but a necessity. Research from LinkedIn indicates that 75% of candidates consider the candidate experience a key factor when deciding whether to accept a job offer. Lengthy response times, disjointed communication channels, and a lack of transparency about the application status can deter promising candidates, leading to high abandonment rates and potentially damaging the employer brand. PeakMade recognized the imperative to reduce barriers between hiring managers and applicants, ensuring timely and consistent communication throughout every stage of the recruitment funnel. These cumulative challenges underscored the urgent need for a modern, integrated solution that could bring speed, visibility, and consistency to PeakMade’s diverse hiring needs, transforming a reactive process into a proactive talent acquisition strategy.
Strategic Shift: The Search for a Modern Hiring Solution
Recognizing the limitations of its existing manual processes, PeakMade Real Estate embarked on a comprehensive search for a future-focused hiring platform. The objective was clear: to identify an applicant tracking system (ATS) that could not only alleviate immediate pain points but also scale with the company’s ambitious growth plans. The evaluation criteria were meticulously defined, reflecting the unique demands of a large, distributed organization operating in a dynamic real estate market. This search began in late 2022, culminating in a decision that would significantly reshape their talent acquisition capabilities.
Key priorities for PeakMade included:
- Ease of Use: Given the diverse technological comfort levels across a distributed workforce, an intuitive and user-friendly interface was paramount to ensure rapid adoption by hiring managers without extensive training. A system that required minimal onboarding would be crucial for widespread acceptance.
- Integration Capabilities: The new platform needed to seamlessly integrate with existing internal tools, such as email and calendar systems (e.g., Outlook), to create a cohesive workflow and minimize disruption to daily operations. This was vital for a company reliant on efficient communication.
- AI-Powered Efficiency: The team sought a solution that leveraged artificial intelligence to automate repetitive tasks, screen resumes more effectively, and provide intelligent insights, thereby enhancing recruiter productivity and accelerating the hiring cycle. The promise of AI to intelligently match candidates to roles was a significant draw.
- Centralized Visibility: A critical requirement was the ability to provide a single source of truth for all hiring activities, offering comprehensive dashboards and reporting for all stakeholders, from individual hiring managers to corporate leadership. This would eliminate information silos and improve collaborative decision-making.
- Enhanced Candidate Experience: The platform needed to support a modern, streamlined application process and facilitate timely, personalized communication to attract and retain top talent. In an era where candidates expect digital-first interactions, this was non-negotiable.
- Scalability: As PeakMade planned for continued expansion across North America, the chosen solution had to demonstrate the capacity to grow alongside the company, accommodating increasing hiring volumes and geographical spread without performance degradation.
- Vendor Support: A strong partnership with the vendor, including robust customer support and a clear commitment to ongoing product development, was also a significant consideration.
The market for HR technology, particularly applicant tracking systems, has seen significant innovation in recent years, with a growing emphasis on automation, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. Industry data from sources like Statista and various HR technology reports consistently highlight that organizations leveraging advanced ATS solutions experience faster time-to-hire (by up to 20%), reduced cost-per-hire (by up to 15%), and improved quality of hires. For PeakMade, investing in a cutting-edge platform was not merely about replacing an old system; it was about making a strategic investment in its human capital infrastructure to gain a competitive edge
