Facilities Manager Job Description

Key skills

Responsibilities

• • Maintain the planned maintenance calendar and ensure statutory inspections happen on time
• • Triage and resolve reactive issues, escalating anything that affects safety immediately
• • Manage cleaning, security, catering, and maintenance contractors against agreed service levels
• • Keep safety documentation current, including risk assessments, certificates, and fire records
• • Run fire drills, maintain evacuation procedures, and coordinate first aid and warden coverage
• • Plan desk layouts, internal moves, and space changes as headcount shifts
• • Own the facilities budget and track utilities and consumables against it
• • Act as the point of contact for the landlord, building management, and inspectors

Requirements

• • Four or more years managing premises, building services, or a facilities contract
• • Practical health and safety knowledge relevant to the jurisdiction and building type
• • Experience managing contractors and holding them to a service level
• • Ability to prioritize competing issues when several things break at once
• • Budget ownership experience with evidence of controlling recurring costs
• • Availability to respond to out-of-hours incidents affecting the building

Nice to have

• • Recognized facilities or health and safety qualification such as IWFM or NEBOSH
• • Experience running an office move, fit-out, or major refurbishment
• • Exposure to multi-site portfolio management
• • Energy efficiency or sustainability project experience
• • Familiarity with access control and CCTV systems and their data obligations

What separates a strong Facilities Manager

Prevention is the tell. Weak candidates describe how quickly they fix things, which usually means their maintenance planning is poor enough to generate constant emergencies. Strong candidates talk about the maintenance calendar, the asset that kept failing until they replaced rather than repaired it, and the contract they renegotiated because the response times were never met. Ask what is in their compliance folder and how they know nothing has expired. Someone who answers instantly and specifically has run a real building; someone who talks in generalities has probably relied on a contractor to remember for them.

Where to source Facilities Managers

Outsourced facilities providers and managing agents supply people who have run multiple sites to contract standards. Building services engineers and maintenance supervisors often progress well, since they understand the equipment rather than only the paperwork. Hospitality, healthcare, and education operations produce facilities staff used to buildings occupied at all hours and to strict safety expectations. Professional facilities and health and safety bodies are useful communities, and local sourcing matters more than usual because response times depend on how far the person lives from the site.

Interview questions to ask a Facilities Manager

Ask how they would take over responsibility for a building on day one and what they would inspect in the first week. Then test judgment under pressure: the air conditioning fails during a heatwave, a contractor cannot attend until tomorrow, and the office is full, what happens next. Follow with a safety question about a hazard they identified and how they got it fixed when it needed budget. Finally ask how they handle a contractor who keeps missing response times, because the answer reveals whether they manage suppliers or simply accept them.

Red flags when hiring a Facilities Manager

Be cautious with candidates who cannot name the statutory checks that apply to a building like yours, since compliance gaps carry legal and insurance consequences. Someone who has only ever raised tickets for a managing agent may not be ready to own the site. Watch for a habit of accepting contractor explanations without verification, and for anyone casual about permits or contractor supervision on site. Reluctance to be contactable when something goes wrong overnight is worth surfacing honestly at interview rather than discovering during the first incident.

How an ATS helps when the building cannot wait

Facilities vacancies often open suddenly, and a site without an owner accumulates compliance risk fast. Pitch N Hire lets you screen on the concrete details that predict fit, such as building type, site size, safety qualifications, and whether the candidate held the contractor relationship directly. Because a facilities interview usually includes a site walk-around, scheduling that stage from the pipeline and capturing structured feedback afterwards keeps the assessment consistent between candidates. Storing certificates and licence evidence on the candidate record also saves chasing documents later, when the offer is already out.