Real estate magnate helps fellow alumni build careers
Jonathan Wener has been fishing in Concordia’s talent pool for decades.
Back in 1975, the chairman and CEO of Canderel Management launched the real estate development company with the $50,000 profit from the sale of his first building at Crescent and De Maisonneuve. Only months earlier, he had purchased it from Concordia.
Seven years later, with his company now established, he donated $100,000 to Concordia’s library. He had never forgotten his alma mater’s pivotal role in both his past and future.
“Concordia gave me my education, the start-up capital for my business and I met my wife there. How much more grateful could you be to an institution?”
Beyond donations and acting as the university’s deputy chancellor, Wener has repaid the gesture by filling many of his company’s senior positions with Concordia grads. Long before it existed, Wener effectively anticipated the ethos of the new Choose Concordians initiative, which encourages graduates to hire fellow graduates.
Launched through Advancement and Alumni Relations, Choose Concordians leverages the university’s three career centres to offer job-posting services, on-campus recruitment, career fairs and a pool of talented students and alumni from the university’s four faculties.
Wener says he took the wisdom of one of his Concordia professors as words by which to run a business: “Machines depreciate. People appreciate. Invest in people.”
His latest investment is, like Wener, a former student union president.
Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and France, Amine Dabchy, BA 11, felt destined for a career in diplomacy, like the parents of many of his International School friends.
Upon his arrival at Concordia — alone in a new, frigid country — he applied his diplomatic skills to warm up to new friends, joining every club that interested him. When he met Wener on the Board of Governors Real Estate Planning Committee, his life direction changed.
“I thought real estate was just building buildings,” says Dabchy. “But I saw how Concordia’s campus had completely transformed in the seven years since I came to Montreal. I realized real estate is more about shaping neighbourhoods, defining the design of the city, changing lives and dealing with people.”
Wener helped plant, then nurture, Dabchy’s obvious passion, one of the key traits he looks for when hiring, along with integrity, intelligence, humility, perseverance and a team attitude.
Another factor Wener seeks is a diversity of interests, which he finds more in Concordians than in students from more purely academic institutions.
“I look very hard at what people do beyond the classroom. Too many students are so wrapped up in studying — book learning, classes, homework — and forget everything else. There is so much more to be had at university if you want to get involved.”
Dabchy concurs. “At Concordia, student life is out there and in your face. You have events every day. Almost everyone you know is involved somehow. It forces you to be more open-minded and think outside the box.”
After undergoing eight tough interviews at Canderel, in May 2011 Dabchy landed the job of analyst, leasing and development, and has since been promoted to coordinator special projects, development. He clearly loves his work.
Sitting in Canderel’s beautifully appointed offices, Dabchy sounds almost as though he’s reading from Wener’s life blueprint.
“I never thought I would be so grateful to a university,” he says. “Thanks to Concordia, I met my closest friends, I got my job and I traveled to Uganda and Israel as a volunteer. The university is like my second parents. Who knows where I will be in 10 to15 years? But I will never forget Concordia.”
Related links:
• Choose Concordians
• Canderel
• Concordia's John Molson School of Business