Hiring is one of those things that looks deceptively simple from the outside. You write a job description, post it somewhere, interview a few people, pick the best one. Done.
Except it is almost never that clean, especially in coworking.
The community manager role — or community operations manager, or hospitality director, or experience associate, or whatever your space happens to call it — is one of the most nuanced jobs in any industry.
The person in it is the face of your brand, the first voice members hear in the morning, and often the one holding the entire member experience together with a calendar invite, a warm hello, and what amounts to sheer force of personality.
Finding that person? That takes some doing.
We talked to three operators and one industry organizer who are all thinking seriously about this. Their answers were honest, varied, and occasionally very funny.
"I kind of panic-hired the first time,” she admits. “No due diligence. And two months in, we were both mutually miserable. Our working styles were completely incompatible."
That experience shaped everything that came after. For Alora, the shift was about slowing down before the process even started. She now begins with introspection.
"It starts with taking the time to create space and to not just analytically think about what the needs of the business are, but to really tune in and be like, where are things at right now? What am I enjoying doing? What is really draining for me?"
She builds the job description from that place. Not from a template. Not from panic. From a clear-eyed read of what the business actually needs at this particular moment in time.
It is a small distinction that makes a big difference.
A lot of operators — especially solo operators stepping out of day-to-day operations for the first time — write a job description that sounds like they are describing what they themselves do. What they actually need is someone who complements them, fills their gaps, and can hold down the work they have been doing while they grow into something bigger.
"I hire for personality, as the skills can be taught, but sadly I can’t teach people how to smile."Matt Irvin of Cocial, a coworking space in suburban Chicago, says something similar. For him, the role is fundamentally a hospitality job, and the best signal is energy.
"It’s a people business. It’s a hospitality business. You’re looking for folks that are outgoing, that have great energy. You want people that believe in what you’re doing, are sociable, people that want to get to know your members. Just a bright, happy person that enjoys being here and enjoys making people’s experiences the best they can be."
Alora goes even deeper. She distinguishes between trainable skills and innate human characteristics, and she screens hard for the latter.
"We can’t train someone to care for the community. There are certain things — like Dana — you could just tell that she loves people. It brightens her day when she sees that the little things she does make a difference in someone’s life."
She also screens for one less obvious quality: someone who genuinely loves checking things off a list. Community management is not just vibes. It is operations. It is follow-through. It is remembering that the person in suite 4 mentioned last Tuesday that they needed an ergonomic chair. If the person you hire cannot hold both the community and the administrative sides at once, the whole thing starts to fray.
None of these operators run a particularly rigid interview process, and they are all unapologetic about it.
"I feel like you just learn more about a person sitting across the table from them over a cup of coffee than you would in a Zoom call. You can kind of tell off the bat if they’re going to be a good fit or not."
Karen agrees. She posted on Instagram, skipped the recruiters to save costs, narrowed down to six candidates, and interviewed them herself.
Her new hire, Holly, was the very first person she met. The bar was set immediately, and no one cleared it quite the same way.
Alora has developed the most structured approach of the three, though even hers is built around instinct. She starts with screener questions on the job posting — not to filter by resume, but to filter out the people firing off applications like confetti.
"The number of applications just reduced dramatically by adding three questions. They gave me a little bit of a flavor of the person, so it’s kind of like the first screen."
From there, she does a discovery call that she describes more as a conversation than a phone screen. She asks candidates to tell her about a working dynamic that worked really well for them — and one that really did not.
"If someone describes a scenario where they had a manager who laid out every single little step and checked in with them on a regular basis, and they’re like, ‘yeah, I love working with that manager’ — I would know that wouldn’t be me. I do not have the capacity to do that. So I think there’s a lot of honesty required about where you are in your leadership."
This is the part that does not show up in most hiring articles: honesty about yourself as a manager. You might be a scrappy, instinctive, solo operator who trusts people and gets out of their way. Or you might be someone who needs a lot of check-ins and structure. Neither is wrong. But pretending you are something you are not will set your hire up to fail.
Platforms vary. Alora has had good luck with Indeed and LinkedIn. Karen used Instagram. Matt uses LinkedIn and has found the hiring process energizing — even if finding the right fit can take some patience.
But the most heartwarming part of Matt’s story is where two of his event coordinators came from.
"We’ve actually had some members reach out, wanting to be event coordinators, and we’ve gotten two event coordinators from members and from their circles. It’s a testament to the community. Through our own ecosystem, we found some great people."
This is not a coincidence. It is the compounding return on a great member experience. When people love being in your space, when they feel like it is genuinely their community and not just a place to sit with wifi, they want to be part of building it. They refer their friends. Sometimes they want to work there themselves.
Here is something coworking has a complicated relationship with: job titles.
“Community manager” has become a catch-all phrase that can mean almost anything — events coordinator, operations lead, membership sales, front desk, social media manager, and office therapist, often all at once.
"There’s not always clear mobility in terms of salary or level of responsibility, and there’s not always clear growth paths in that function,” she says. “Over the last eight years working across the ecosystem, I’ve seen a lot of talented people leave the coworking world not because they don’t love the community manager function or the industry, but they just don’t see potential for long term career growth after stepping into the role."
FLOC is working to change that. Sam’s goal is to build a more sustainable pipeline for early-to-mid career coworking professionals — people who want to grow in the industry but have not had a clear path or enough visibility into what that could look like.
Coworks CEO DeShawn Brown is on the FLOC board, which is the kind of alignment that tends to signal something real is happening. FLOC is small but growing, community-driven, and structured to be low-commitment on purpose: four quarterly workshops, one in-person event, and a WhatsApp channel that keeps things accessible for people who cannot leave their space for a full conference.
Alora, meanwhile, has already done her own version of this rethinking. She renamed her hire’s title from “community manager” to “community operations manager” on purpose.
"I think it’s important to recognize that this person is supporting and managing and cultivating and stewarding a community, and also holding a lot of back-end operations. Community and operations manager encapsulates more of the role."
It is a small change with real weight. When you name a role accurately, you attract people who understand what they are actually signing up for.
Alora wanted to flag something that she sees operators get wrong more than they admit: defaulting to part-time out of budget anxiety.
"A lot of operators say, ‘I can only afford a part-time role.’ But when you actually think about the amount of time it takes to onboard a part-time role, and the lack of actual investment in the space and the community — I tried part-time, and it wasn’t until I shifted the role to full-time that I actually started getting aligned candidates."
The math works differently than it looks. A full-time hire who is genuinely embedded in the community generates membership retention and growth. A part-time hire who is stretched and under-invested often does neither. Sometimes.
Getting the hire right is one thing. Keeping them — and setting them up to actually do well — is another.
Alora has even developed a detailed onboarding doc that she refines with each new hire. It starts broad. And you can get your own copy of it here, along with some words of encouragement from Alora herself.
"I really start at ground zero. I have a doc with a schedule and links to resources where I’m really trying to communicate: what is the vision of this place? What are our values? What is our ethos of how we interact with our members? Because when they’re having conversations with people, they have to be able to listen, pick up subtle cues, and guide someone into an offering that would genuinely be supportive."
Karen’s approach is more streamlined: standard HR and finance onboarding, followed by regular weekly meetings to stay aligned and catch anything before it becomes a problem. The boutique scale of The Residence means she can stay close.
Matt’s star hire, his community manager Fiona, has taken so much initiative that the onboarding, by all accounts, mostly took care of itself.
"She just rolls up her sleeves and gets after just about everything. She takes so much initiative. She’s been almost like a second part of my brain, where we’re kind of thinking the same thing, or I’m stuck on something and she just has a great idea."
That is the dream. That is what good hiring looks like when it lands.
To be honest,. coworking is not like corporate America, and most independent spaces are not going to offer a traditional career ladder. That is okay, as long as you are honest about it.
"I think that there’s two ways to think about it: Alora shares. “One is you surrender to the fact that the role will be seasonal, and it will be perfect for a stage of someone’s life, and then they will move on. It’s an incredible way to get exposure to a ton of different professions. It’s a master class in so many ways. Or you find people who really love the stability, who are good with stewarding the space. There’s no right or wrong."
Matt is optimistic but grounded. As Cocial grows, he wants to bring his team along with it. And Karen is honest that as a boutique operator, formal growth tracks are limited, but she compensates by genuinely empowering her hires to take on as much responsibility as they can handle, and staying out of their way.
Sam Shea sees this as one of the industry’s bigger challenges, and it is part of why FLOC exists. When there is no visible pipeline, talented people leave. Not because they stopped loving coworking, but because they could not see a future in it.
"A rising tide lifts all ships,” she adds, echoing one of our favorite sentiments about coworking in general. “When one of us does well, the rest of us do well. And that includes investing in the people who actually run these spaces every day."
At the time of the interview, Alora was working remotely out of India while her hire Dana ran The Pearl Works back in California. She called into a regular early morning check-in. She got updates of new members joining and the community supporting each other.
"It’s even better than when I was running the space myself. It’s so cool to see how these seeds we planted at the beginning. Now we’re four years in, with someone else stewarding the space. It’s even better than I could have ever imagined."
Matt’s community manager Fiona has helped Cocial grow month after month. And Karen’s new hire Holly cleared the bar on the very first interview and never looked back.
Good hiring is not about finding a unicorn. It is about starting from the right place. Be honest about your needs, honest about your management style, clear about your values, and trust that the right person will recognize themselves in what you have built.
The process will not be perfect. It will evolve. You will make a mistake or two and learn from it. But you will also, eventually, sit across from someone who just gets it. And that will be worth all of it.