Facilities manager recruitment fails in a familiar way. The brief is a title. The agency returns people whose LinkedIn headline is the same title. Nobody has asked what the week actually looks like. “Facilities manager” can mean a single-building supervisor with a radio, or a director holding a national P&L, a client, and a plant room that failed in January. Those are not neighbouring rungs on one ladder. Volume desks treat them as if they were.
VS Recruitment does not hire the title. Viktorija Sherriff headhunts. She opens a named search for a £450 engagement fee and works her own network — construction, facilities, site and project management, property. She does not scrape job boards. She does not spray CVs because a filter said “FM”. The person who can run your building, or your contract, is usually already running someone else’s. They take a call. They do not apply to a vacancy that could have been written for any estate in the country.
The wider argument is in construction recruitment that starts on site and on built sector recruitment. This piece is the FM brief: why the title is not enough, where the duty sits, and why a discreet network search is how you reach the person who has already held the work.
“Facilities manager” is not one job
Write the asset, not the abbreviation. Is this hard FM, a mixed contract, a single occupied building, a mobile multi-site patch, or a client-side head of facilities sitting above several contractors. Does the person own the P&L or only the helpdesk. Do they sit with the client when the audit goes badly, or do they escalate and hope. A CV that says facilities manager does not tell you which of those you are looking at.
Contract managers sit in the same family of search when they run the building as an operating asset rather than a stack of reactive tickets. Site managers are a different brief — a construction phase, not a live building in occupation. See site manager recruitment when that is actually the hire.
The hiring pain is rarely a shortage of PDFs. Facilities manager recruitment, done as a title match, produces people who have supervised a helpdesk and people who have held a hard-FM contract as if those were the same conversation. You then spend a fortnight sorting them.
The duty does not sit on a job title
A facilities manager often has control of the premises. That is not a branding point. GOV.UK is plain about workplace fire safety: you are the responsible person if you are an employer, owner, landlord, occupier, or anyone else with control of the premises — “for example a facilities manager, building manager, managing agent or risk assessor”. If there is more than one responsible person, you have to work together.
Appointing a fire risk assessor does not move that duty. The assessment has to be suitable and sufficient for this building, not a reprinted template. Fire risk assessor recruitment is its own search; see fire risk assessor recruitment on the built-sector page. What matters for an FM hire is whether they understand that the duty can sit with them, and that they will have to live with the assessment.
VS Recruitment is a headhunter, not a fire-safety adviser. If your FM owns the building in practice, hire someone who has already held that kind of duty, not someone whose title was promoted because the last person left.
Every UK employer also has to check that a successful applicant has the right to work. That duty is the employer’s. The process is on GOV.UK: check a job applicant’s right to work. A careful search does not skip it.
Hard FM, the client, and the winter the plant failed
The useful test is still the ugly Tuesday. Who did they call when the plant failed. What did they tell the client. Did they already know the building, or were they managing a spreadsheet of other people’s tickets. Have they held a mobilisation, a TUPE, a painful audit, a night-porter conversation that could not wait until Monday.
Facilities manager recruitment that never asks those questions will always prefer interview fluency. People who can talk about “the FM strategy” will outscore people who can tell you what they did when the heating died in a live building. If your contract lives or dies on the second person, do not hire the first because their title matched.
Viktorija was head of recruitment for a national facilities business. She hired the full FM stack: site managers, fire risk assessors, contract and facilities leaders. That is the network this search uses.
Operatives are network depth, not the named search
Soft-FM operatives exist in the network. Cleaning, portering, a mobile maintenance patch: she can often reach people. A £450 named search is not a cleaning rota. It is for the person who runs the operatives, the contract, or the building. If you need volume at the operative layer, say so early. She will tell you if that is not the work.
Do not turn this into a cleaners vacancy. Facilities manager recruitment, here, means the leader — single site or multi-site, hard or mixed, in-house or contractor-side — who already knows what the asset does when nobody is watching the dashboard.
Why volume desks flatten the market
A job board advertises your problem, the salary, and the fact that you are hiring. For an FM still in post on a client contract, that is often enough to keep them from applying. The people who do apply are willing to be seen applying. Some of them are excellent. Many of them are always on the market.
A network-only search is the other shape. The role is not posted. Your name stays quiet until there is a reason to share it. People are approached as professionals, one conversation at a time. That is how you hire discreetly. For a facilities leader sitting on a sensitive client, discreet is not a tone of voice. It is the method.
£450 opens that search. It is not a placement invoice and it is not a listing charge. If the brief is not a fit — you want a hundred CVs, or you want a cleaner filled by Friday — she will say so before anyone pays.
A short note is enough. The building or the contract. Hard, soft, mixed. What “good” looks like on a Tuesday. Whether the hire has to stay discreet. Start a search. Facilities manager recruitment fails when the title is the brief. Do not make that the brief.
Frequently asked questions
Why does facilities manager recruitment fail when the title is the brief?
Because “facilities manager” covers too many jobs. A single-building supervisor and a director running a national contract are not interchangeable. A named search starts with the asset, the client, and the Tuesday — not the job title.
Do you fill cleaning and other soft-FM operative roles?
Operatives exist in the network. A £450 named search is for the person who runs them, not for filling a cleaning rota. If that is the hire you actually need, say so; she will tell you if it is not the work.
Who owns workplace fire safety — the FM or the assessor?
GOV.UK lists a facilities manager as an example of someone who can be the responsible person where they have control of the premises. Appointing an assessor does not move that duty. Fire risk assessor recruitment is a separate search, on built sector recruitment.
Can you hire a facilities manager discreetly?
Yes. Nothing is posted on a job board. Viktorija approaches people through her network. Your name stays quiet until there is a reason to share it.
What does the £450 fee buy?
It opens a named search. It is not a listing charge and it is not a batch of unsolicited CVs. If the brief is not a fit, she will say so before anyone pays. See how it works.
Do you also recruit site managers?
Yes. That is a construction-phase brief, not an occupied-building brief. The two searches sit next to each other in built sector recruitment; they are not the same hire.
Is right to work part of this?
The check is the employer’s duty. Follow GOV.UK: check a job applicant’s right to work. A careful search does not leave it as a surprise at offer.