Staffing Efforts
The historic labor shortage is double-trouble for the title insurance industry, as we head into yet another healthy buy-sell market in 2022.
With an estimated 10M+ job openings in the U.S. coming into 2022 and only 6.5 million Americans actively looking, the title industry finds itself competing for a shrinking pool of available workers.
Why double-trouble for the title industry? The title industry has always been plagued by the lack of formal training. There are no candidates graduating from community colleges or four-year colleges with a degree in title and escrow, putting a title company in the role of educator and boss. We know from historical experience that this same problem has plagued the appraisal industry as well, forcing appraisers to spend an enormous amount of time and money mentoring young appraisers coming into the industry.
But there are several good, basic strategies you can employ to address the problem. Here are four tactics successful title companies have used to overcome the labor shortage in title.
Make Hiring and Training Top Priority: Always be on the lookout for young, ambitious applicants. Once in the door, provide a formal, comprehensive training program covering every aspect of title and escrow, giving them the opportunity to gain experience and advance within your company.
Crosstrain to Fill in the Gaps: Often, companies tend to silo their employees – both by job title and location. If you have a large staff and multiple locations, think about cross training as well as letting staff spend time in other offices, where they can jump in when more help is needed in a particular function or location.
Create an Atmosphere of Trust: When employees are treated with trust and respect, permitted to make work life balance decisions for the care of their families, and given the opportunity to advance, they want to stay with you. The title and escrow industry is known for people jumping ship looking for greener pastures. Make sure yours is the greenest!
Unburden Escrow and Closing Professionals: Automating time consuming or repetitive processes can free up time for your highly experienced Title, Escrow and Closing Professionals so they can stay focused on the complex work for which they were trained.
On this last note, one of the tasks your professionals struggle with the most is the constant interruption to answer repetitive and mundane questions.
Alanna integrates seamlessly with most of the major title production systems to handle basic inquiries from your customers. The company’s artificial intelligence application can take on repetitive tasks, communicating with your customers through SMS text or web chat to answer many basic questions and provide important updates they need throughout the process.
But you already knew that!
Automation in many aspects of the title industry provides significant time and human resource savings. In the current employment market, Alanna is already helping numerous title agents take on one of the most important functions for any title agency: improving overall customer care and experience without having the need to enlarge your staff.