How to stop staffing up and down for manual verifications

The pitfalls of hiring/firing cycles

Staffing up and down has been a longtime practice among mortgage providers. What is it exactly? It’s a continuous hiring and firing cycle that follows mortgage rate fluctuations. When rates go down, lenders hire staff to manage incoming requests. When rates go up, they lay off staff because there’s not as much origination volume.

This vicious cycle incurs high personnel and training costs for businesses and negatively affects employee morale and retention in the mortgage industry. But mortgage providers don’t have to continue with this archaic approach to managing capacity for market fluctuations.

Scalable capacity to manage market fluctuations

A modern approach that lenders are turning to is the concept of scaled or flexible capacity, backed by technology, to help them maintain consistent and predictable staffing levels. With this approach, there are no swing cycles of staffing.

Instead, existing staff’s time is optimized to be more productive and geared towards tasks with higher ROI—no matter what loan origination volume is—letting technology or third-party platforms manage the transactional or tedious tasks year-round. A more productive business means that the team can maximize their sales volume during high mortgage volumes and focus on efficiency during leaner times without having to hire or fire anyone.

Smart Outreach to manage the ups and downs

Manual outreach is historically one of the most tedious and time consuming processes, requiring teams to pick up the phone and call employers to verify employment in the event that other methods fail. Depending on the employer, manually verifying a single applicant could take hours, even days, for someone internally to complete. When volume increases, lenders traditionally hire more people to make these calls, leading to inefficiencies, bad use of time, and long completion times for verifications.

Truework’s solution for managing loan origination volume brings automation to manual outreach for non-instant verifications. In our fully automated verification waterfall, Smart Outreach is one of many methods used to provide a fully complete and accurate verification report.

Smart Outreach is more than one-to-one outreach to employers. Under the hood is a proprietary, expansive database that covers over 80% of U.S. working adults, especially those with less straightforward employment histories. Using automation and machine learning, we leverage every outreach to identify common patterns and optimize for the next time around, leading to a 25% zero touch method of verifying applicants. This means that for 25% of manual verifications, no one has to actually pick up the phone to verify employment, saving teams countless hours in the verification process. On top of that, 57% of verbal verifications can be completed within the same day.

Our automated approach to outreach especially helps with complex situations where capturing employment data is not as straightforward. Examples include:

• Employers who operate at the corporate level and through franchised locations
• Employers that have a different trade name than their legal business name
• Employers who have been acquired by other employers

In addition to automated data collection and optimized outreach, all data is validated for accuracy, and parsed and organized into a standardized format so that teams don’t have to deal with disorganized notes and data when it comes to verifications.

Most importantly, Smart Outreach optimizes previously fully manual outreach efforts. No matter what their loan origination volume, lenders don’t have to worry about scaling, retraining, and quality assurance every time there is an influx of applications or requests. As part of a broader solution of automated verifications, automated outreach efforts can augment existing processes, leading to more fixed and predictable costs when it comes to verifications and loan originations. As for your teams, with manual dialing off their plates, you can optimize and uplevel their tasks to be productive all year round.

What is Truework and Smart Outreach?

Truework is the only all-in-one, automated VOIE platform that fully replaces in-house waterfalls for mortgage providers by orchestrating all major verification methods with a single platform. With Truework’s industry-leading 75% completion rate, mortgage providers achieve up to 50% cost savings and up to 80% completions in 24 hours.

Smart Outreach is one of our orchestrated verification methods, in addition to Instant, Credentials, and Documents.