Little has been written about what you should look for in a candidate beyond a track record as a loan officer. As you will see, even the experienced loan officer needs more scrutiny than we typically apply. Why is that?
- For one, the experienced loan officers that are the easiest to recruit are typically not the best performers. Top producers generally don’t answer advertisements for loan officers.
- Secondly, the cost of a bad hire in terms of money, reputation and more. We will focus on just one major point here: the time and energy bad hires drain from your business will make it less likely you will have any time and energy left over to recruit better hires. It is a vicious cycle.
Because we don’t have the time to recruit, assess, train and mentor those without experience, many times we are forced to accept lesser experienced candidates and give them a shot. Meanwhile, very high quality candidates without experience are left on the outside looking in. We have seen this scenario play out again and again within this industry:
- Hire someone with six months of loan officer experience who has not originated much of anything. If they were successful in any way, they would not be looking for a job six months later.
- Don’t hire someone who has built a business previously and has thousands of contacts within their sphere.
It is easy to see what is wrong with this picture. Thus, what we need to do is:
- Have tools so that a sales manager and an organization can systematically assess experienced and inexperienced candidates for this industry.
- Learn what experiences are essential to the success of a loan officer.
- Learn what traits are essential to the success of a loan officer.
- Utilized a formal and scientific system of assessment that will further help managers and companies solidify their choices.
- A system of competency testing for experienced loan officers.
- Learn interviewing and reference checking skills that also will be essential in helping a sales manager assess candidates.
It is important to make one last point before we move on. We introduce the vast majority of these experiences and traits during our Business Building Success Course, along with the concept of the mirror. One overriding trait which is a requisite for success, is determining whether a loan officer candidate knows where they have to improve in order to succeed. Therefore, the burden of assessment does not fall only upon the manager, but the candidate as well.
Dave Hershman is Senior VP of Sales of Weichert Financial and the top author in the mortgage industry. Dave has published seven books, as well as hundreds of articles and is the founder of the OriginationPro Marketing System and Mortgage School – the online choice for expert mortgage learning and marketing content. His site is www.OriginationPro.com and he can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
