If you’ve been in mortgage banking for any length of time, you’ve hired at least one salesperson who aced the interview and met production benchmarks – on paper – but failed to perform past the onboarding process. During my management career, I certainly hired my fair share of candidates who talked a good game and worked for well-known banks but couldn’t sell if their life depended on it.
Here’s the thing: interview performance is not a reliable indicator of whether a sales candidate will succeed in the originator position. Studies show that interview performance accurately predicts job success only 14% of the time.
This exact scenario is why I’ve been involved with research-based pre-hire assessments for the past 20+ years. When I started my consulting practice, it was important to me to partner with industrial psychologists who were scientists using data-driven analysis to help take the guesswork out of hiring.
With a pre-hire assessment, managers still have to interview but having an analysis that pinpoints a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses – and predicts sales success – is worth its weight in gold. For mortgage managers who recognize the quality of their originators is essential for long-term success, investing the time and money to get the hiring process right is a no-brainer.
Think about it like this: Would you make a loan to a home buyer without a credit score or a tri-merge credit report? No, you wouldn’t, even if the borrower was someone you knew. The same sentiment should apply when hiring loan officers – the people responsible for driving revenue and creating long-term success for your organization. Now is the time to adopt a more advanced analysis and level up your hiring process.