The mortgage industry has experienced tremendous change, opportunities and growth over the last decade, and now, we’re taking the next steps forward.
As we look toward tomorrow, we believe the industry's future will be built with sales professionals who are carefully selected, properly trained and effectively assimilated into the workplace. With a limited pool of experienced loan officers to pull from, mortgage companies are experiencing an overwhelming demand for new sales professionals.
At XINNIX, The Academy of Excellence, we have developed a proven, award-winning model for bringing new loan officers into your company, called the XINNIX Formula for Success. In this strategy, successfully sourcing new employees can be broken down into four steps:
- Locating
- Screening
- Assessing
- Compensation
We’ve already discussed the screening process in an earlier blog post — and today, we’ll talk about how your business can effectively assess applicants to uncover their true potential.
Why Are Candidate Assessments Crucial?
By providing an assessment during the hiring process, you can identify your candidates’ skills, strengths and weaknesses. Below are a few examples of how assessments can benefit your organization’s hiring process:
Streamline the Hiring Process
By taking assessments into consideration, you can streamline the hiring process by only interviewing the most qualified candidates.
Since assessments can help you make decisions about which candidates to move forward with, you can spend more time focusing on quality candidates who are excited about working at your organization. Plus, this saves time for your existing employees who can now speak with fewer candidates during the interview process.
Hire the Right Employees
Hiring the right people is critical to keeping your team running smoothly. You’ll want to hire a diverse pool of people who have different perspectives, achievements and experiences in order to maintain and evolve your company’s culture.
By understanding your candidates' skills, mindsets and personality traits, you can effectively train and place them in the right positions on your team.
Increase Employee Retention
Hiring the right people has positive short- and long-term effects for your organization.
According to Quantum Workplace, “disengaged employees were 3.3 times more likely to leave their company within 90 days of the survey compared with highly engaged employees”. You can increase employee retention by selecting the right people to join your team. By creating a supportive environment through effective training, empowerment and growth, you’ll see an increased retention rate that uplifts the reputation of your business.
The Assessment Process
DriveTest
The DriveTest is an online assessment that helps determine whether candidates have the most critical personality trait for success in sales: drive. Drive is the passion and determination top sales professionals possess that propels them in their quest for success.
The DriveTest allows you to identify high-potential candidates and dramatically increase the quality of your sales team. The DriveTest pre-employment testing measures three elements:
- Need for achievement. This measures the intense desire to attain excellence and accomplish challenging goals.
- Competitiveness. This section measures the unquenchable thirst to outperform one’s peers and win the customer over to their point of view.
- Optimism. This area measures the certainty and resiliency that will not be denied.
Sales Call Reluctance
Sales Call Reluctance is the fear of prospecting or self-promotion, often appearing in one or more of 12 ways. This assessment allows you to detect and measure a potential candidate’s specific sales call reluctance.
The assessment is not a personality test or a measure of someone’s success — rather, it’s a powerful tool to assist you in identifying potential unproductive behaviors that may lead to setbacks in sales success.
Most mortgage leaders would agree that their loan officers need to make more sales calls than the average role and this is even more critical for new officers. However, prospecting is one of the most challenging parts of the job. According to SPOTIO, “More than 40% of salespeople say prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process.”
Since many people find prospecting challenging, your organization needs to set your team members up for success.
Empower Your Team With XINNIX
With the right tools, you can thoroughly understand your candidates during the hiring process and add only the most qualified professionals to your team. If you’re ready to get started, we’re here to help.
XINNIX’s quest is to make true and lasting change in the future of the mortgage industry by empowering leaders to build a high-performing culture of excellence. We want to help your team succeed through training, empowerment and support.
Explore our ebook, 10 Key Takeaways for Building a High Performance Culture of Excellence, to learn more about making excellence a priority at your organization.