About Thomas: Thomas is a Customer Success leader with over a decade of experience with SaaS organizations in both the Telecom and Financial Services industries. Thomas currently leads Customer Success & Product at Model Match, a Talent Management Suite designed to help leaders in the mortgage space source and attract qualified talent, and manage their team with greater efficiency.
As a business owner, your success depends on a variety of different experiences: If you’re running a retail business or most any other kind of traditional brick-and-mortar business, a great customer experience is required. If you’re running an online business or creating an online presence for any other type of business, you want to make sure your website, platform or service provides a great user experience. A great user experience is what keeps your customer or users coming back time and time again. But what about when you’re looking to expand your business by adding new employees? What kind of experience are you providing to your candidates?
It’s natural for business owners to be involved in their businesses as much as possible, while also looking for opportunities to bring in those they can trust – and who can bring their own expertise to the organization. Of course, that starts with choosing the right people to hire, which can be a challenge in these unprecedented times. Hiring people without meeting them face to face has meant relying largely on technology to get to know people, which can make it difficult for a wide range of reasons. You have to learn how to use that technology to engage and interact with people in a way that will allow you to read whether they’re a fit for your culture, and at the end of the day, it’s about building and maintaining relationships and partnerships.
In the mortgage space, recruiting has gone virtual as well, which has been and will continue to be another major adjustment for the industry. So much of the mortgage industry is driven by relationships, most of which are typically forged and maintained in person. For most of 2020, almost all of that moved online, which created its own kind of challenges on the talent acquisition side. But as the pandemic eases and businesses reenter growth phases, many business owners are choosing to jumpstart this growth process with strategic recruitment.
The renewed focus on technology that helped many businesses adapt during the pandemic can and should now be refocused proactively and merged with their recruiting efforts as businesses start to emerge into their new potential for growth. One great way to do that is by using automation to improve their own candidate experience. Implementing talent management systems and other Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms can help businesses automate and organize candidates so they’re not losing top talent to competition that has the advantage of moving faster and are more organized.
Recruiting the best talent for your business should always be seen as a process rather than a single event – and that process should be shared by stakeholders across your entire organization. A dynamic process isn’t going to help much without tools that scale right along with you and your goals, and if you’re still using spreadsheets to track your pipeline, you’re already working from behind. Here’s how a proper talent management system can help you get out with the old and in with the new:
- Visibility: Using a software platform that can give visibility into your overall recruitment success and progress – holding you accountable and showing stakeholders throughout the company that you’re doing your part and deserve a seat at the table.
- Collaboration: A centralized recruiting platform helps you stay on top of your game and not lose track of priority candidates – everyone has visibility into recruitment progress.
- Data: Identify candidates that might be lost or unknown. You need to know who the key players are in your space and be able to get in front of them leveraging data to have impactful conversations
- Conversation Outcomes: By proactively tracking the outcomes of your conversations each candidate in your pipeline, you can create schedules and measure milestones to stay ahead of other companies that might be vying for the same candidates. You can identify areas for improvement and measure the types of candidates you’re having success with.
Keeping it personal – with technology
Of course, all the technology in the world is no substitute for the work it takes to start conversations with people – and turn those conversations into relationships at scale. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use technology as a tool to supplement those conversations. Using a conversation-based platform that essentially applies intelligent automation to the conversations you should be having with your candidates, turning that part of the process into an organized campaign with conversation templates, pre-built workflows, reminders and lots of other features to get your people talking. This platform not only lets you stay on top of lead time and stay responsive with priority candidates via analytics, but also helps you keeps those conversations personal – a perfect balance that will help you create a great candidate experience.
Using technology allows you to stay competitive in your space and is one way you can grow a solid team – and ultimately grow an even better business.
About Model Match
Model Match is an award-winning, innovative platform that supports individual and team hiring goals in the mortgage and financial services industries. The Model Match recruiting solution incorporates processes, best practices and proven methodologies for sourcing, attracting, hiring, onboarding and retaining production talent. The platform enables its clients to efficiently and effectively manage infilling and strategic growth initiatives by leveraging their best resources, their managers, leaders and internal recruiting departments.
The company is headquartered in San Clemente, Calif.