Recruits ghost, bonus wars drag on, and recruiting keeps losing to the fires on your desk. Here are straight answers from Richard Milligan, who built 21 mortgage teams and has coached thousands of recruiting leaders since 2017.
Free, live, every other Friday at 12 pm Eastern.
15 years in mortgage as a loan officer, producing branch manager, and divisional leader. Host of the Recruiting Conversations podcast (70,000+ downloads) and author of How to Dominate Recruiting in a Digital World.
Last updated October 7, 2026
Most branch managers were promoted for producing, and nobody taught them to recruit. These loan officer recruiting answers come from Richard’s coaching calls with mortgage leaders, built from the questions they bring him every week.
Richard Milligan, founder of 4C Recruiting, sets the bar at 30 minutes a day. That’s about 5 percent of a 50-hour week, which his data shows is typical for a producing manager. Inside that half hour, the goal is two recruiting conversations every working day, and the time stays on the calendar even in a busy month.
Two conversations a day across 22 working days comes to 44 a month, and in Richard’s experience that puts a leader in the top 1 percent of an already high-performing room. Some days it takes 15 minutes and some days it takes the full hour. Most leaders recruit in bursts after a producer walks out the door, and the ones who grow protect the time like a closing they’d never miss.
Start with a clear picture of who you want, then build the list. Richard Milligan calls this your avatar, the producer who fits your values, your culture, and your model. Once it’s defined, market data tools like MMI and MODEX let you pull loan officers by market and production range, and your own network fills in the rest.
Values come first and production comes second. A big producer who doesn’t share your values costs more than they bring. Market data also keeps your goals honest. In one market Richard worked through with a client, Modex data showed only about 14 or 15 of every 100 producers in the $8 million to $14 million range changed companies in a year. Knowing your real pool lets you set a capture-rate goal (the share of movers you plan to win) and stop chasing a hire count someone handed you.
Your warm network is the fastest source of all. Richard’s Dream 100 is the list of 100 people you already know who are the shortest path to your next hire, and building it is the first thing he has new clients do.
Invite them to a 15-minute conversation and promise, in plain words, that you won’t talk about your company or try to recruit them. Richard Milligan teaches that this promise is what makes the invite safe to accept. Opening with “would you be open to a better opportunity” triggers resistance before you’ve earned a conversation.
His first-call framework has four moves.
Early objections usually come before the producer knows you’re about to take the pressure off, so they’re guarding against a pitch that never comes. Get through all four moves and most of that resistance drops. Read more in the first conversation.
Plan for about 7 touches. Richard Milligan sets the goal of those touches as one 15-minute conversation, which is a much closer finish line than a hire. Leaders who quit after one or two unanswered messages decide a prospect isn’t interested long before the prospect has decided anything.
Mix your channels. Connect with the recruit on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram before the first phone call, so your name is familiar when it shows up and the call lands warm. If there’s still no answer after 7 touches, the relationship isn’t over. Move them into your monthly Forever Follow-Up and keep delivering value until the timing is theirs.
The 15-Minute First Meeting is Richard Milligan’s relationship-only first conversation with a recruit. The leader says up front that it isn’t a recruiting conversation and won’t include company talk, then spends the time getting to know the person. Recruits come in guarded and expecting a pitch, and this format lets them relax.
Richard teaches that conversations move from social to emotional to decision-making, and the first meeting lives in the first two. Ask about their story, their family, and what they’re building and why. Protect the agenda and keep the clock honest, because ending at 15 minutes when you promised 15 builds trust fast. In Richard’s own recruiting, switching from selling the company to meeting people as a leader moved his meeting yes rate from about 1 in 25 to about half.
Skip “would you be open to a better opportunity” and anything about your company. Richard Milligan teaches that both put a recruit on defense before you’ve earned a real conversation. Open by affirming them, give a big reason you’re calling, invite them to 15 minutes, and tell them plainly there’s no pressure.
Hold back the corporate presentation, too. For over a decade Richard ended recruiting meetings by sending a polished, expensive deck, and he says no one ever joined because of it. It gave recruits everything they needed to decide alone, so they did, and the relationship ended there.
Reframe it calmly. Richard Milligan’s line is that he’s never invited anyone to his team he didn’t already have a relationship with, and the recruit has never joined a company without one with the leader. Offer the 15 minutes to start that relationship. If they still won’t invest the time, that tells you something useful.
The first 15 minutes works as a culture filter. A producer who demands a pricing or sign-on number before any relationship exists is showing you how they’ll make decisions later, and a team built on the biggest check is the easiest team to lose. When a recruit wants numbers early, there’s a better opening than the money. Richard offers an analysis of what their book of business is worth somewhere else, framed as information they keep whether they ever move or not.
Invite a specific next step before you hang up. In Richard Milligan’s sequence, that’s usually a second conversation, either a 30-minute coaching session on something real in the producer’s business or a look at your vision document on Zoom. Only after that does the leader ask about alignment.
Most leaders have a great first call and then nothing to offer, so the relationship stalls. The invite also tells you where you stand, since how a recruit responds to coffee, lunch, or a second call shows whether they’re cold, warm, or hot.
A personalized growth roadmap is one of the strongest next steps available today. Richard feeds a recruit’s public production data and the leader’s playbook into AI and gets a 12-month plan in 90-day phases with the recruit’s name on it. Leaders who use it report recruits showing up on day one still holding the document.
A recruit went quiet after the first call. Bring it to the Working Lunch and Richard will workshop it with you live.
Most ghosting comes from misreading the recruit. Richard Milligan teaches that leaders get ghosted when they treat a cold recruit like a warm one and push too fast. The fix is to end every meeting by inviting a specific next step, like coffee or lunch, so the recruit’s answer tells you whether they’re cold, warm, or hot.
The second cause is having no brand behind you. Recruits look you up before they show up, and a thin profile gives them a reason to skip.
Call length is a useful early warning. Richard tracks it on recruiting calls, and a call that reaches four minutes almost always turns into a meeting that happens. A 97-second yes rarely does, because the producer never got curious enough to show up.
Once a month, forever. Richard Milligan’s Forever Follow-Up rule is one piece of extravagant value per contact per month, until they ask you to stop or leave the industry. Weekly is too much unless the recruit is hot. A plain check-in doesn’t count, because the value has to be something they’d want even if they never join.
Extravagant means beyond reasonable. Examples from Richard’s coaching include a quarterly market update, an analysis of what their book of business is worth, or a screenshot of how they show up when someone searches their name in AI, with a playbook to fix it. Block one hour a month to send it to your whole list, or schedule it so it goes out on its own.
Richard calls this visibility before relevancy. When a producer is finally ready to move, the leader who’s been showing up for months is the obvious call, and the leader who calls cold that week is a stranger.
Change the tone. Richard Milligan uses humor at the fourth or fifth unanswered touch, like a self-aware voicemail or a funny video, to take the pressure off. People who go quiet often feel a little guilty about it, and a light message gives them an easy way back into the conversation.
One voicemail Richard has left says he thought about dialing 911 because he hadn’t heard back, then laughs it off and says he knows things are crazy. Let go of the offense while you’re at it. Richard says recruiters need to be more like dogs than cats. A dog whose tail gets caught in the door still comes back happy to see you, while a cat holds a grudge for days.
For a warm relationship that’s gone cold, ask permission before you start sending value again. Tell them one of your goals is to be more useful to the people you know, and ask if you can send ideas that help their business. The outreach feels welcome instead of out of nowhere.
Build a value stack and help the recruit see the bonus’s real number. Richard Milligan teaches that whatever you recruit someone with is what you retain them with. Win on a bonus and a bigger bonus takes them away. Win on value nobody else offers, and they have nowhere else to go.
The math changes how an offer feels. In Richard’s example, a $50,000 bonus on a five-year clawback comes to roughly $32,000 after taxes, and that’s the real decision the producer is making.
Ask permission first. Richard Milligan opens by asking if he can walk the recruit through how bonuses work across the industry, then shares the story of someone who took a similar offer and learned its real value after signing. The recruit hears an advisor explaining the math, and the other company never gets criticized.
Then run the numbers together. In another of Richard’s examples, a $75,000 bonus paid over 24 months with a clawback nets out to about $2,000 a month in take-home pay. For an experienced producer who thinks like an owner, he frames the clawback period as the recruit buying back their own business.
Bonuses can get large. STRATMOR Group reported that signing bonuses as high as 100 basis points of volume were common in the high-margin market of 2020 and 2021 (source). Keep the conversation calm and analytical, and let the recruit reach the conclusion on their own.
Deliver on every promise in the first 90 days. Richard Milligan treats onboarding as part of recruiting, because the first 90 days is when a new hire decides whether the move was worth it. Loan officers who chase a bigger check often leave again within the first year, and a clear first 90 days prevents most of it.
Two simple habits made the difference for one leader Richard coached through bringing on a large producing team. He held a 15-minute rapid-fire meeting every morning for the first 30 days with operations and marketing in the room, and his processor emailed a status on every in-process file at the close of each business day for the first 90. When those hires were surveyed at 90 days, they called it the best onboarding they’d ever had.
Write down exactly what a new hire gets in their first 90 days and show it to recruits before they commit. A clear plan makes the decision to move feel safe.
All client results are anonymized.
In the back half of the year. Richard Milligan’s analysis of state licensing data shows loan officer moves are lowest in Q1, climb each quarter, and peak in Q4. That makes summer and early fall the time to build relationships, so you’re already in the conversation when producers start deciding.
Yes. Recruits look you up before they agree to meet, and a thin profile makes them wonder if you’re worth the time. In one test Richard Milligan ran with a mortgage company, pointing recruits to the leader’s active, professional LinkedIn profile lifted first-meeting show-up rates by 18 percent.
In that same test, about half of recruits had been dropping out before the first meeting. Reach takes volume, too. Richard points out that posting 20 times in a month still means only about 60 percent of your audience sees you once, so consistency matters more than polish.
Posting makes you visible, and a direct message makes you relevant. Pair your content with personal outreach so the recruit already knows your name when you reach out. Richard’s Social ID approach keeps it manageable, because you document the life and leadership you already have and don’t have to invent anything.
Use AI to make every recruit feel like the only one. Richard Milligan’s favorite example is a personalized growth roadmap. Feed a recruit’s public production data and your playbook into AI, and in minutes you have a 12-month plan built around their numbers. Specific plans move people in a way general pitches can’t.
Three more uses from Richard’s coaching:
Ask permission before you record a recruiting conversation (Richard frames it as being terrible at taking notes), then use the recruit’s own words to make the roadmap specific to them.
No. 4C Recruiting doesn’t recruit for clients. Richard Milligan and 4C coach recruiting leaders to become better leaders first, then build their own recruiting system, so the results belong to the leader and keep working after the coaching ends. Since 2017, 4C has coached thousands of recruiting leaders, with mortgage as its core industry.
The system is called Recruiting Made Simple, and it grew out of the 32-step recruiting process Richard wrote at the end of 2013, when he was still leading mortgage teams. It covers phone and social scripting, the 15-Minute First Meeting, a plan for cold, warm, and hot recruits, and Forever Follow-Up, and it runs in about 30 minutes a day. One client used it to hire 18 loan officers in 90 days.
The Working Lunch is a free, live recruiting workshop hosted by Richard Milligan every other Friday at 12 pm Eastern. Recruiting leaders bring real problems, like a recruit who went quiet or a bonus they can’t match, and Richard works through them live. There’s no pitch and nothing to buy.
Each session runs one hour. Register once and you’re in for every Working Lunch going forward, and the event calendar shows every upcoming date. It’s the easiest way to see how Richard coaches before you decide on anything else.
Richard Milligan is the founder of 4C Recruiting and a recruiting coach for leaders who manage a team and recruit to it. He spent 15 years in mortgage as a loan officer, producing branch manager, and divisional leader, built 21 teams, and founded 4C in 2017. He also hosts the Recruiting Conversations podcast.
Nobody taught Richard to recruit. He grew three teams in his first 11 years, lost his business in the 2007 collapse, and rebuilt it on relationships, calling past clients one by one to apologize for never following up. At the end of 2013 he wrote his first recruiting system, and over the next three and a half years he built 18 teams. He’s the author of How to Dominate Recruiting in a Digital World (2022) and lives in Edmond, Oklahoma, with his wife, Leah.
4C Recruiting coaches recruiting leaders, meaning people who run a team and are also responsible for recruiting to it. That includes producing and non-producing branch managers, area and regional managers, divisional leaders, and owners and CEOs. Mortgage is the core industry, and the same system works for real estate, insurance, and wealth management teams.
Most of these leaders were promoted for producing and never taught to recruit. They’re short on time, their outreach gets ignored, and they feel stuck competing on sign-on bonuses. 4C doesn’t primarily coach solo recruiters without a team, because the system is built for leaders who recruit people to their own team and keep leading them after they join.
The answers above cover the patterns. The recruit sitting in your pipeline right now is its own problem, and that’s what the Working Lunch is for. Every other Friday at 12 pm Eastern, recruiting leaders bring real situations to Richard and leave with a next step they can use that afternoon. It’s free, it’s one hour, and there’s no pitch.
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Free, live, every other Friday at 12 pm Eastern. Richard works through real recruiting problems with you. No pitch, nothing to buy.