Expanding your new broker team with sales or admin support
If you’re running your own mortgage broking business, at some point you may need to expand your team. But what’s the best way to do this? Do you hire a mortgage broker to help you generate sales and deal with customers, or a loan processor to help with the admin, account management and paperwork?
Here are three questions to ask yourself when looking to make your first hire.
1. What gaps do you need to fill?
Hiring your first team member is an opportunity to fill any gaps in your skillset by recruiting someone better suited to perform those tasks. You should be able to keep doing what you do best in the business.
You might be the type of mortgage broker that’s naturally talented at networking and bringing in business. If you’re a natural salesperson and get weighed down by admin and ongoing operational requirements, a savvy loan processor may be the best option for you.
On the other hand, you might be excellent at the back end, and enjoy getting paperwork in order, submitting applications, liaising with banks etc. In this case, a switched-on mortgage broker recruit might be the right option.
Read next: Getting your first mortgage is hard but this guide makes it easy
2. How can you save your time?
While recruiting someone is going to free up your time down the track, it requires a lot of time and effort in the immediate. Think about how many hours you actually have available to onboard someone, and how much nurturing your new recruit will need. Training a mortgage broker to effectively communicate your business’ value can require a lot of input, while training a loan processor may be much quicker and give you back some crucial thinking time needed to take your business to the next level.
3. Are you a business or a broker?
A business has structure, systems, processes and templates – things that will help develop consistency so operations run smoothly. You may discover that you don’t actually want to go down the route of starting a business. Perhaps you’re perfectly comfortable writing whatever volume you can manage on your own and building your book. There’s nothing wrong with that!
Once you know your objective as a business owner, then you can think strategically about what you need to do to grow. This may mean hiring brokers to help with the volume of customer interactions, or processors to help you manage the admin.
Making your first hire is a crucial time in your business, so don’t rush it. Stop for a moment, consider the above questions, and develop a hiring strategy that aligns with your business goals.
Roland Youakim is director of specialist recruitment agency Platinum People Group. He has been guiding businesses within the mortgage broking, aggregation, financial planning and retail and third-party banking sectors since 2010. Roland is passionate about building creative recruitment strategies and efficient processes that deliver better candidates in less time.
