A staging company dresses empty flats and villas so they sell or rent faster, working to a developer's or owner's deadline. This is how to run designers, movers and installers around short, fixed windows.
Not sure what you need? Tell us about your business in six short steps and we will come to the first meeting prepared.
Share your requirementsA home staging service rents or places furniture, art, curtains and accessories in properties that are about to be shown to buyers or tenants. The team is small and varied. Stylists plan the look, a warehouse team stores and repairs inventory, drivers and loaders move it, and installers arrange it in the property, often within a single day. Work arrives in bursts: a developer opens a show apartment, a seller wants a flat staged before a weekend, or a project finishes and needs forty units dressed at once. Everything is judged on how the home looks on the viewing day, so deadlines cannot slip. Items are valuable and easy to damage, and crews enter other people's homes. For the wider sector, read HR for construction and real estate.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in home staging services. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
A big developer order needs twenty hands for a week and then nothing, so the permanent team is either stretched or idle.
A scratched table or stained sofa comes back from a job and nobody can say which crew handled it.
Installers work inside flats that belong to others, and one complaint about behaviour or missing items can end a client relationship.
A creative person asked to finish a showflat overnight loses patience with a coordinator who changes the brief late.
Delays at the warehouse or in traffic turn into overtime and angry calls, because the buyer visit cannot move.
Loaders and installers carry sofas and beds up stairs, often without lifts, and back strain is common.
Extra loaders arrive for a big job and learn how to handle fabric and glass while the clock runs.
A seller asks for a different colour scheme the night before and the crew absorbs the cost in hours.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a home staging services business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A rolling view of booked and likely jobs so the core team and the extra helpers are lined up in advance.
A rolling view of booked and likely jobs so the core team and the extra helpers are lined up in advance. See workforce planning.
A job sheet listing each piece, its condition on leaving and on return, signed by the crew lead, so damage is traced to a job and not guessed.
A job sheet listing each piece, its condition on leaving and on return, signed by the crew lead, so damage is traced to a job and not guessed.
A short conduct note for crews working in occupied or private properties, covering shoes, phones, keys and photographs.
A short conduct note for crews working in occupied or private properties, covering shoes, phones, keys and photographs. Teach it in onboarding.
A list of casual loaders who have already done a handling session, with dates, so peak days do not start from zero.
A list of casual loaders who have already done a handling session, with dates, so peak days do not start from zero.
Trolleys, straps, two-person rules for heavy items and a no-rush stance on stairs.
Trolleys, straps, two-person rules for heavy items and a no-rush stance on stairs. See workplace safety.
A written cut-off after which design changes cost extra, so crews are not asked to redo a flat the night before a viewing.
A written cut-off after which design changes cost extra, so crews are not asked to redo a flat the night before a viewing.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Planning who to hire and when, so crews and teams are ready before the work arrives.
Lifting rules and stair-handling habits that protect loaders and installers.
Handling and home-entry briefings for new crew and casual helpers.
Early starts, weekend installs and time off that are planned and recorded fairly.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
8 min readRead article
How a D2C founder can decide which digital marketing work to hire for, which to buy from an agency, and which to split, with a worksheet and a five step plan.
6 min readRead article
A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead article
Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
9 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Enough to cover the steady base of work, usually stylists, a coordinator and a warehouse lead. Peaks are better met with trained casual helpers than with idle permanent crews.
Photograph items and the space before and after, record who was on the job and agree responsibility in the client contract. Ask a qualified professional about insurance and liability wording.
It happens, but plan for it. Agree extra pay or time off in writing, limit consecutive late nights and do not rely on goodwill alone.
Give them ownership of the look, a say in suppliers and credit on finished projects. They leave when they are used as order-takers.
List accessories on the job sheet, count them out and back, and make the crew lead accountable for the count. Most loss is slackness, not malice.
We can help set up crew planning, a job sheet with signatures, a conduct note for home entry and basic records. Legal and insurance questions go to a qualified professional.
All 109 business types in construction and real estate · Find another business type
See all HR topics for construction and real estate, or another industry.
Tell us what is slowing your team down. We’ll help you find a practical way forward, starting with a conversation.
