Dear Mortgage Company Leader,
I am not the only voice in the mortgage recruiting arena but I get to speak from a unique perspective as I coach leaders (VP’s, Regional Managers, Area Managers and Branch Managers) on a daily basis in becoming better recruiters.
I get to speak from the position of having spent 15 years inside the mortgage industry building teams with a high level of success. I also speak from the heart of a person who for the past 10 years has made it his mission to understand the art of recruiting and combine it with systems and processes that have maximized my success.
Let me start by stating the obvious,
every organization has blind spots.
I hope to at least inspire you to consider recruiting as being a potential blind spot for your company. Your competition isn’t going to point this out to you so at this point you can consider me on your team.
The conversations had with recruiting leaders reveal the following about the majority of Mortgage Companies:
- Recruiting systems and processes are lacking.
- Follow up and follow through is mediocre at best.
- Opportunities are falling through huge cracks and you have no idea it is happening.
- The time it takes you to connect with interested talent (yep candidates who already know who you are and want to work with you) is lagging.
- No one is identifying interested candidates who are in the “warm” zone and should be considered low hanging fruit (there are triggers that you are missing in reading the tea leaves in places like LinkedIn and your Corporate website).
- You have no way of tracking talent as they move through your recruiting pipeline so you end up with multiple leaders connecting with an interested candidate and fumbling through conversations. These conversations end up turning off candidates due to this leading to a false narrative.
- Good communication is lacking at critical moments where recruits have adequate information to make a decision so you delay opportunities by creating next steps. Some of these next steps go through committees and additional decision makers when you should already know if the candidate or the branch is a fit due to identifying information earlier in the process.
- Your plan of having regional/area managers travel to markets once every few months making themselves the “go to” person for hiring decisions is costing you good talent and creating poor recruiters out of your branch managers.
- You have no plan for improving the recruiting skill sets for your regional and branch leadership.
- You lack having a larger CRM platform to follow your recruiting efforts from start to finish. If you have a CRM it isn’t robust and being used by key people in the organization.
- Your inability to create metrics and measure recruiting efforts is noticeable.
Here are 3 helpful pointers around the “Gathering Information” phase that will reveal the larger need for recruiting insights……..
1) Ask your recruiting leaders to walk you through the process they take candidates through. Have them go all the way back from when they identified a candidate and walk you through as if they hired the candidate . Once you have this information compare it across your organization to see if you truly have a system in place.
2) Follow up with a handful of candidates your company has engaged with over the past 6 months. Do this yourself. This won’t take more than a few hours and it’s well worth the feedback you’re going to receive. Ask these questions to the candidate after they pick themselves up off the floor because you cared enough to call.
- What is your honest view of our company having met with some of our leadership?
- Where are you with making a decision centered around joining my company?
- What was our last point of contact with you?
- What could we have done better to engage you and to have convinced you to join already?
3) Engage “fresh eyes” to review your entire recruiting process. Have someone review your recruiting model from end to end.
Your 2018 success in a shrinking market is going to depend on your ability to improve your recruiting processes, systems and recruiting abilities ACROSS YOUR ENTIRE ORGANIZATION.
Fannie Mae 2018 Mortgage Origination Forecast
You have 30 days to identify the changes that are needed. Move quickly as the recruiting season is upon you.
