Last week I said that the #1 tip I got from hanging out with a bunch of top producing loan originators at a mastermind retreat is that you must hire an assistant — regardless of how small your loan volume might be today.
So how do you go about hiring an assistant?
The first step is to place an ad on Craigslist. If you have not hired anyone for the past couple of years, Craigslist has easily become the number one place for “help wanted” ads. I run a small mortgage company in the Seattle area with my wife. We used to place ads in the newspaper and on Monster.com when we wanted to hire employees. But for the past few years, Craigslist has blown away those job ad sources — at a tiny fraction of the cost.
In Seattle, it costs $25 per category to run a “jobs” ad … in some areas of the country it is free. We typically place an ad in two job different categories to get more exposure.
For example, we are currently running an ad for a “receptionist / office assistant” because we are promoting the current person in that position to become an assistant to our 3 loan originators.
You see, I am following my own advice! 
We have placed the job ad in the “office/admin” category and in the “real estate” job category to attract people who might have real estate and/or mortgage experience.
Click here to see a copy of the actual ad we are running on Craigslist.
Notice that we go into great detail in our ad to be very specific about the kind of person we are looking for:
Busy Mortgage Broker in the Factoria area of Bellevue needs a FRIENDLY, energetic, detail-oriented receptionist/office assistant. You must have an awesome, outgoing personality that shines through on the phone!
We expect you to be competent and professional, and you MUST be a positive person who loves talking to people on the phone and MAKES FRIENDS with our clients and prospects.
This is done to weed out the people who “don’t get it.”
Surprisingly, of the scores of resumes that we received, only a handful bothered to say they are “friendly on the phone.”
But that’s fine. THOSE are the people we are looking for!
The job applicants who don’t even bother to include a cover letter with their resume, or send a form cover letter that is obviously being sent to multiple employers are not worth our time because if they are too lazy to try and make a good first impression on us, they won’t work very hard to make a good impression on the people who call our office.
Customer service is EXTREMELY important at our company, so we take our time to hire the RIGHT person. We have learned that it is more important to hire a person with a positive attitude and friendly personality who can be trained rather than somebody with a lot of experience who is an “energy vampire” sucking the positive vibes out of the office with their constant complaining and moodiness.
There’s an old saying: “hire slow and fire fast.”
Which means take your time to find a GREAT employee rather than setting for an “OK” employee … and if you accidentally screw up and hire the wrong person, don’t be afraid to quickly correct that mistake by firing them.
You can usually tell if an employee is going to work out with a couple weeks. In my experience, you are only hurting yourself (and the employee) if you continually give him/her “one more chance” to get their act together. If it’s not working out, fire them fast so they can go out and look for another job. You’re actually doing them a favor because if you keep them on for 3-4 months and then fire them, they have to explain that short employment period on their resume or the long gap if they choose to leave you off their resume. A two-week gap can easily be explained as “job hunting time,” they don’t even have to mention that they worked for you.
If you hire the right person, an assistant can be the best thing that ever happened to your loan origination business because he/she frees up your time to concentrate on high dollar value activities such as talking to your prospects and clients on the phone.
But if you hire the wrong person, an assistant can make your business worse by creating a poor impression with your clients and costing you money by screwing up details on your loan files.
Take your time. Do it right.
Hire a GREAT assistant.
You’ll be glad you did!
October 5, 2009
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