Mortgage Manager Community Blog

Recruiting a Team

How much is a good loan officer worth? How much does a bad loan officer cost you? These are two great questions. When you think of “how much” with each question, don’t just think in financial terms. Sure money is a big concern, but it’s important that you consider time, energy, stress, and fit as well. How much time are you spending with high maintenance loan officers? How much energy are they costing you? How much stress? Do they “fit” within the culture of your company? Are they aligned with what you’re trying to accomplish? If you don’t put some thought and work into these questions, you’ll find the path to mortgage success very bumpy indeed.

Don’t feel bad, recruiting, hiring and retaining talented people is a difficult job.  The first step toward success is to understand the nuances between recruiting and hiring.  Recruiting to seek out talented players that will support your business’s outcomes, getting them onboard, and aligning their personal outcomes with the outcomes your company is trying to achieve is the trick.

You may have someone in your company who is excellent at recruiting yet falls short in the hiring process.  In the restaurant business they have a saying, “get ‘em in…get ‘em out… get ‘em back!”  We certainly don’t want to take that approach in the mortgage business.  We could say, “get ‘em in… get ‘em going… keep ‘em!”

If you invest and commit to a recruiting effort, you must also invest and commit to the implementation of the hiring effort as well.  I have seen many mortgage companies make great decisions, while falling short on the implementation process.  This has a tendency to remove most of the value of a great decision.  While managing, mentoring, and keeping talented mortgage originators are important to success, the purpose of this article is to get ‘em and get ‘em going.

            

Dave Bush is a speaker, entrepreneur, mentor, coach and consultant to business owners and other successful sales professionals across the nation.    

A Great Recruiting Plan is Not Rocket Science

Sales management is one of the most difficult jobs within the mortgage industry. Most sales managers are personal producers and produce at a level which constituted a full time job before they became managers. After 50% of their time or more is taken by their personal caseload, how much time is left to dedicate to great management skills?

 

Unfortunately, the majority of the rest of a sales manager’s time is quickly absorbed by fighting fires. It is said that 80% of a manager’s supervisory time utilized by 20% of the poorest performers. This leaves precious time for a manager’s most important task—recruitment.

 

Why is recruitment a manager’s most important task? A manager can possess the best management skills in the world, but if that manager hires the wrong people their life is going to be a supervisory nightmare. Rule #1 of great leadership is to hire the right people. Most managers cannot hire the right people because they do not have the time to dedicate to a great recruitment plan. This is because they are spending their time trying to fix the wrong people. Sounds like a vicious cycle? You bet it is!

 

The question remains: how do we break out of this vicious cycle? We could try to outline a recruitment plan that would absorb ten hours of a manager’s time each week. The actions would look great on paper. In reality, there would be no implementation of such a plan. Our sales managers do not have an extra ten hours each week to expend, no matter how much time and stress it will save them in the long run. The only solution is to find synergies between the manager’s present activities and the recruitment objectives.

 

We have already identified what activities occupy the greatest portion of a manager’s working day; personal production and supervision of present employees. We must identify actions which will help us meet recruitment objectives and increase personal production. We must also identify actions which will help us increase our supervisory capacity and help us meet recruitment objectives.

To illustrate this point, let us take a few examples:

 

· Most sales managers hold periodic sales meetings. Far too many managers complain that these meetings degenerate into complaint sessions (why are our rates too high?) and far too many originators complain that these meetings do not help further their sales objectives. Perhaps we are spending too much time focusing on problems and products. How much time does the manager spend focusing on the company’s number one objective—attracting top notch sales and operations personnel? Do you ask each originator to help you recruit every week and entice them with incentives? When your sales force becomes part of your recruitment plan, they are forced to start focusing on the positives within their environment. It also helps solidify their own loyalty. Why recruit alone when you could have a recruitment team of several members working in concert to meet your objectives?

· One of the major goals of producers is to learn about their competition. Your objectives for interviewing targets should always include several questions regarding whom they are presently using, whom their peers use, what level of service they receive and more. What better way to benchmark potential recruits than by in-depth interviews with your targets. If their report is glowing: you have a recruitment target. If their report is not so glowing, you have a great opportunity to obtain more business. Ask the target to set up a meeting with you and their favorite originator, just to network. You will be surprised at how you might benefit. Many producers report that the majority of their production comes from loan officer sources, rather than Realtors^Ò or builders. Of course, not everyone can handle every deal. Talk about real synergy!

 

These examples sufficiently illustrate how we can link the two most time consuming elements of a manager’s day with the number one objective—recruitment. Of course, before we go about implementing these solutions, we must have a clear idea of our recruitment objectives. All too often we recruit anyone who is available—blindly—and wind up adding bodies instead of upgrading our staff.

 

When we open our eyes to take full advantage of the concept of synergy, there will be no end to the possibilities. Any action which helps us meet more than one objective will decrease our stress levels because they help us conserve our most precious resource—which is time. Any upgrading of our staff will also help decrease our stress levels. More productivity and less stress? You bet!

Dave Hershman
dave@hershmangroup.com
Click here to read Dave's bio

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