Battle for qualified new hires heats up

With the exodus of boomer executives picking up speed and genXers moving to fill their spots, the search for new, qualified originators is proving difficult

With the exodus of boomer executives picking up speed and genXers moving to fill their spots, the search for new, qualified originators is proving difficult.

For those doing the hiring, it is definitely a jobseekers’ market.

“Recruiting has been extremely competitive lately and there are challenges to finding good people,” says Mark Buskuhl, the COO of Southwest Funding. “We are hiring originators and branch managers right now and offering more new hire incentives than ever before.”

For many companies, that has meant taking a proactive approach and going to colleges and, in some cases, high schools, before students even begin their job search.

“We’ve been looking at hiring from the local community colleges,” says Buskuhl.  “We want to recruit people with potential to become the leaders we can be proud of when we ourselves move on from the industry.”

More than ever before, proper recruiting and training needs to be at the forefront of what we're focusing on in the mortgage industry, point out HR professionals in the mortgage origination channel. They’re looking to professionalize a sector just now rebuilding from the PR devastation of the last recession.

Still, insiders caution that the mortgage sector needs to be even more careful about who it admits into its ranks and how they are trained. That’s especially true given the forecast for some 77,000 new positions to be added to the mortgage industry in the next five to six years -- that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.