Mortgage Talent Wars- Who Owns the Strategy, Process and the Results?

Mortgage Talent Wars- Who Owns the Process and the Results?

In today’s recruiting climate within the retail mortgage industry, it more closely resembles a war for sales talent. But who truly owns the recruiting results and sales growth at the local branch level? Is it the National Sales Manager? Is it the Regional Manager? Is it the Internal Recruiters with their numerous requisitions? Is it the external recruiting firm that your company has contracted with to help that branch grow? Or is it the local Branch Manager with the “the LO boots on the ground”? Being that real estate industry is considered a local business driven by local experts you would rationally conclude, recruiting local talent that will service the local market, should be ultimately owned by the local Branch Manager. All recruiting is a local battle within a 50 miles radius of the branch location and therefore needs to be localized. Now yes, all parties mention above have some varying degrees of ownership in the process and can contribute to the end results. But are they accountable to the point of losing their job or having their job eliminated due to lack of local sales growth? My experience has been no, they are not held to that degree of accountability! The final responsibility of that local branch’s growth is solely on the Branch Manager.

By using a military mindset in developing a recruiting strategy moving forward, that strategy should be broken down to its individual stages and the importance of those stages and how they interact within the overall process. Once the manager is trained on the needed skills and the overall management of the process, then it becomes their responsibility and they assume ownership at the local level for accomplishing each of those stages. That includes whether portions of the process are tasked out to internal recruiting or external recruiting resources, because at the end of the day it is the manager’s responsibility. This is only accomplished by coaching support and repetition until the task of managing and executing the process becomes second nature to the Branch Manager. It is important in today’s market that there needs to be a strategic recruiting plan at the branch level that follows a systematic process that the manager can implement and manage. RMs and BMs need to have a process that they consistently follow day to day, week to week. A recruiting process and a sales process have similar processes and can be tracked and measured. A High Performance Recruiting process should be very similar to the High Performance Sales process with clearly defined stages and goals, it needs to be agile, transparent to all partners, fluid and holds every partner accountable. Also there should be skill enhancement training, situational scripting and role play simulation, and the necessary coaching for the utilization of those learned skills to execute the needed actions. Those actions need to be measurable at each stage and the manager and their recruiting partners need to be held accountable to those activities and targets weekly. The process and supporting metrics along with built in accountability factors should be designed so that each manager can consistently make measurable recruiting progress every month. If there is not consistent actionable progress every month within their recruiting pipeline, then that pipeline will run dry and the manager will return to reactive recruiting behaviors not proactive recruiting behaviors. While having a recruiting target and recruiting support is important, just having the target with unorganized support without a strategy and process to achieve it, is doomed to failure.

The USA Armed Forces never sends a soldier into battle unless they have been provided the tools to succeed and have been coached extensively on the use of those tools. And that is always coupled with a battle plan and a strategy. Anything less is chaos.