Hire the Person. Train the Skills.

What affordable housing’s most effective operators know about building a team from the ground up

By the Affordable Housing Training Academy  •  3-minute read

In the last post, we made the case that the affordable housing industry is caught in a trap: searching for experienced candidates who no longer exist in sufficient numbers, while open roles sit vacant and teams absorb the cost.

So if the experienced candidate pool has dried up, what’s the alternative?

A growing number of operators have found one. And it starts with a simple but significant shift in how they think about who they’re actually looking for.

The Insight That Changes the Calculus

One experienced affordable housing leader put it plainly: he stopped looking for people who already knew the work. Instead, he started recruiting from the hospitality industry.

His logic was straightforward. Hospitality workers know how to deal with residents, manage conflict, handle competing demands with professionalism, and show up consistently for a team. Those aren’t soft skills — they’re the foundation of effective property management. The affordable housing piece? That can be taught.

This is the core of the “hire the person, train the skills” approach: separate what a candidate must arrive with from what your organization can build in them after they arrive.

The affordable housing piece can be taught. What can’t be taught is work ethic, accountability, and the ability to treat residents with dignity.

What You’re Actually Hiring For

When you strip away the industry-specific requirements, the qualities that make someone effective in affordable housing property management are largely transferable from other fields. Consider what you actually need from a new hire in the first 90 days:

• The ability to communicate clearly and professionally with residents, vendors, and supervisors

  
  

• A baseline level of organization and follow-through on assigned tasks

  
  

• Reliability — showing up, on time, ready to work

  
  

• The temperament to stay calm under pressure and handle complaints without escalating them

  
  

• A genuine willingness to learn

None of those qualities are exclusive to affordable housing. They exist in people who have managed retail teams, worked in healthcare administration, served in the military, or spent years in customer-facing roles of any kind.

What those candidates don’t have — yet — is LIHTC compliance knowledge. Fair Housing certification. An understanding of how Section 8 recertifications work, or what a UPCS inspection requires or even basic property management skills.

That’s the knowledge gap. And the question is whether your organization has a reliable way to close it.

The Story That Makes the Case

Nicole Cox didn’t arrive at her organization with years of affordable housing experience. She started as a part-time rent clerk.

What she had was exactly the kind of foundation that can’t be trained: a drive to learn, the work ethic to follow through, and the judgment to grow into greater responsibility. Her organization recognized it. And instead of waiting for a more qualified candidate to walk through the door, they invested in building the qualifications she needed.

Leveraging the AHTA platform, Nicole earned her HCCP and COS certifications. When a Property Manager position opened, she was ready for it.

“Wanting to learn more and advance within the organization, I began taking AHTA classes. When the Property Manager position opened, I was ready.”

— Nicole Cox, 2025 AHTA Learner of the Year

Nicole’s story isn’t unusual. It’s repeatable — if the right training infrastructure is in place to support it.

The Practical Framework

Shifting to a potential-first hiring approach doesn’t require overhauling your HR department. It requires two things: a clearer picture of what you’re actually screening for, and a dependable and methodical way to build the industry knowledge once someone is hired.

On the screening side, that means rewriting job descriptions to lead with the transferable qualities rather than the compliance experience. It means structuring interviews around behavioral questions that surface accountability, resilience, and coachability. It means being willing to make an offer to a strong candidate who needs six months of training rather than holding out for one who arrives ready on day one.

On the training side, that means having a system — not a collection of PDFs, not a YouTube playlist, not a regional manager who walks the new hire around the property for a week. A system that delivers consistent onboarding from day one, covers the regulatory knowledge that protects the asset, and can be assigned and tracked without creating more work for supervisors who are already stretched. A repeatable, consistent system that delivers high quality training to allow you to close the skills gap.

The organizations winning this staffing battle aren’t finding better candidates.

They’re building them.

The Shift in Mindset

This approach requires letting go of a deeply ingrained assumption: that training is something that happens before the hire, not after it. That the right candidate arrives already equipped.

In a labor market with plenty of experienced candidates available, that assumption worked. In the labor market affordable housing is operating in right now, it’s the source of months-long vacancies and teams stretched past the breaking point.

The organizations that are navigating this well have made a different bet: that a motivated person with the right foundation, given structured training from day one, will outperform the phantom experienced hire every time.

In the next post, we’ll look at what that structured training actually needs to do — and how the fastest-moving organizations are compressing the time from hired to fully trusted.

Request a free demo at www.ahta.online.