How Do I Recruit Someone to Run My Estate?

The honest answer: not by posting a job. By conducting a search.

When a household reaches the scale where it needs someone to truly run it, an estate manager who oversees the property or properties, the staff, the budgets, the vendors, and the daily operation, families often start by trying to hire the way they would for any role: a posting, a few interviews, a hopeful choice. For a position this consequential, that approach rarely finds the right person, because the right person is usually not looking, not local, and not on any list. Recruiting an estate manager is a search, and understanding that is the first step to doing it well.

The core of it is recruiting to a specific brief rather than choosing from whoever applies. A great estate manager for your situation depends on particulars, the number and type of properties, the size and nature of the staff to be led, the systems and budgets involved, the degree of discretion and the temperament required, and the search should begin from that detailed picture and go to find the person who fits it, including candidates who are not actively on the market. This is executive search applied to the private household, and it is the method that surfaces the caliber of professional these roles demand.

It requires vetting equal to the access. An estate manager will hold keys to nearly everything, so screening must be exhaustive and transparent, layered criminal searches, verified employment and references, confirmation of the management track record claimed, and discretion treated as fundamental.

It requires understanding how the role is structured and paid. Senior estate managers are executives, frequently compensated well into six figures with benefits that may include housing, retirement contributions, and bonuses. Recruiting one means being able to reach professionals at that level and to structure a package that secures them.

And it benefits enormously from a firm rather than a solo effort. A firm experienced in these searches knows where the right people are, how to approach and vet them, and how to structure the placement, and it stands behind the result; ours carries a full-year guarantee, with placements that last for years.

We have recruited estate and household managers for private clients, across one or many residences, since 1999. To recruit someone to run your estate, conduct a real search rather than a job posting, define the brief precisely, vet to the depth the access demands, understand executive compensation, and engage a firm built for searches of this consequence. It is the approach Nannies + more…® was built on, and the one we keep.