If you’re a mortgage technology vendor and you’re located in a place not generally known as a hotbed in that industry—like, say, Appleton, Wis.—where do you find skilled employees?
Why, just about everywhere. And you let them work at home.
That’s the employment strategy at Appleton-based LoanSifter Inc., a provider of loan pricing and applicant eligibility software. Fully two-thirds of its staff of 95 full-time employees work remotely.
It’s certainly not unusual for sales and client services people to work remotely—they need to be out in the field calling on and servicing customers. But most of LoanSifter’s software developers also work from home.
And the company has been in a hiring mode. Thirty-five of its 95 employees were added just in the past year.
It probably wouldn’t have been able to do that without embracing a remote workforce, says Mark Coupland, vice president of business development at LoanSifter.
“When you have the ability to have remote office employees, you can tap into talent across the country,” he says. “It allows us to pick up top-notch talent where we find it. If we were unable to do that, we’d have to spend much more time recruiting in certain geographic areas, which would limit you. In the mortgage industry, you find top-notch talent in different geographic areas. Being able to tap into those areas has been critical.”
“If LoanSifter can recruit somebody into the home office it will, but if you can find better talent that has the ability to work in a remote office environment, then we will, without hesitation,” he says.
Appleton isn’t really that different than most other places, he says, in that software developers who also have mortgage industry experience and expertise are hard to find, except in a few places where many such firms have tended to congregate, such as parts of Florida, Texas, Southern California and North Carolina. As a result, the company has had to go after employees wherever they live.
“There are certain developer roles that don’t require any mortgage experience at all, and those are easily found near our headquarters, there is a talent pool there,” Coupland says. “But as soon as you add the words mortgage experience’ or expertise’ to that technical role, then all of a sudden our horizons broaden. Because those people are not a commodity. That’s a very specialized role.”
Coupland—who, not surprisingly, works not in Appleton but in Los Angeles—says the company’s relative youth may have something to do with its less restrictive employment strategy. The company was founded in 2006 and its products began hitting the market in 2007.
“We’re still pretty young, and that may be one of the reasons we took a more contemporary approach to a remote office environment,” he says.
Coupland says LoanSifter appears to be one of the few companies in the mortgage technology space that has such a high percentage of its non-sales workforce working outside the office.
“It’s interesting to see how surprisingly few people do have that remote office experience,” he says. “It’s becoming more common, but I don’t think I would necessarily call it mainstream except in the sales arena.”
That may be to others’ detriment, he says. “I think companies that aren’t able to take advantage of that are going to grow their talent, and therefore their business, slower.”
LoanSifter says having a remote workforce provides several benefits in addition to broadening its universe of prospective employees.
“One of the things about this model that some people overlook is from a business continuity standpoint,” Coupland says. “Having employees in different areas of the country protects you against any type of disaster or other issues that could happen in an individual office.”
It also provides other benefits, like speed and redundancies.
“We take the Google approach,” he says. “You have a lot of little worker bees’ distributed everywhere, doing bits and pieces of the transaction, and then piece it altogether. That’s how you make sure you have redundancies and speed. We found it to be very successful.”
Of course, not everyone is cut out for working remotely. LoanSifter tries to find that out during the recruitment process.
“One of the things that we qualify employees for is at-home work experience and work environment, because working at home isn’t necessarily for everyone,” Coupland says. “There are certain personality types that are going to be more self-driven, and others that do want that more collaborative, structured office environment. If you recruit the wrong person and have them work remotely, you’re bound to fail. LoanSifter screens pretty heavily for that.”
That doesn’t mean remote employees don’t need to be managed. The best way to do that, Coupland says, is by setting deadlines and delivery dates that must be adhered to.
“All of our remote positions are usually project-based to an extent,” he says. “Deliverables are set on a regular basis, and accountability is on a daily basis to ensure that productivity is there. There are some ways we use technology to monitor that productivity, but I think the most effective way to monitor that is setting those deliverables.”
George Yacik has been covering the residential mortgage business for more than 20 years and writes frequently for industry publications. He can be reached at gyacik@yahoo.com.
