We hire for attitude. Then why did you reject my last three candidates?

Should you hire mortgage brokers for attitude or for experience? Most principals say attitude, then reject candidates for lacking experience. The broker turnover data suggests a lot of brokerages are quietly doing the opposite of what they claim, and it is costing them the exact people who would have stayed.

The bottom line: The brokerages with the lowest turnover hire for attitude and invest in developing skills, while the high-turnover ones hire for experience and wonder why people leave. FinTalent screens for disposition and transferable skill, then helps principals build the onboarding that turns the right person into a broker who stays.

Almost every principal I speak to says the same thing. “We hire for attitude. Skills can be taught. I can train someone to write a loan. I can’t train someone to care.”

I believe them when they say it. I think they believe it too. And then I send them a candidate and the feedback comes back: “Great person, just not enough experience.” Every single time. So I want to ask a direct question. Do you actually hire for attitude, or do you hire for experience and tell yourself it’s attitude? Because those are two very different things.

What does the broker turnover data show?

Victoria has a broker turnover rate of 6.9%. Queensland sits at 10.2%. The national average is 8.1%, according to MFAA’s data. The Northern Territory is at 14.7%.

These numbers don’t emerge from nowhere. They are the compounded result of thousands of individual hiring decisions made over years. Who gets interviewed. Who gets offered. Who gets passed on because they hadn’t written loans before.

The states with the lowest turnover are not drawing from a superior talent pool. They are not paying more than everyone else. What the evidence points to is a different hiring philosophy, one that is more willing to bring in people with the right disposition and invest in developing the technical skills, rather than waiting for a candidate who already has both.

The states with higher turnover tend to hire for experience first. And then they wonder why experienced brokers keep leaving for better offers or to go out on their own, because experienced brokers have options. There is a direct cost to this. When you hire someone who already knows how to write loans, you reduce your short term training burden. But you often inherit their habits, their way of working, their loyalty to their previous aggregator relationship, and their sense of what they are worth. And if cultural alignment was not the priority in the hiring decision, you are more likely to find out it was missing at the 12 month mark rather than the 12 week mark. The turnover figures are simply that pattern, totalled up.

Why do job ads contradict “we hire for attitude”?

The job ads tell the same story. Right now, broker roles advertised on Australian job boards are asking for “minimum one year loan writing experience,” “two to three years in mortgage broking or lending operations,” and “proven experience in mortgage broking preferred.” Attitude is not mentioned. Values alignment is not mentioned. What the person believes about client relationships and how they like to work is not mentioned.

The ad and the philosophy are completely disconnected. And here is the practical problem with that. The people who would genuinely thrive in your business, who have the right instincts, the right work ethic, the right approach to clients, who just haven’t written loans before, read that ad and self-select out before you ever get to meet them. You are filtering for experience before the conversation even starts. It is the same disconnect behind why so many broker job ads fail to land.

1,200 new-to-industry brokers entered the market in FY25 according to MFAA data. Many of them came from banking backgrounds with years of relationship management, credit assessment and client service experience. None of that shows up as “broker experience” on a resume. But it is exactly the kind of background that, inside the right brokerage with genuine onboarding support, produces a broker who stays. It is worth understanding where new brokers actually come from before you write the next ad.

The ones who do not stay are not always the inexperienced ones. The 15% of brokers who settled zero loans in the last six months, 2,610 people according to the same MFAA data, are not all new entrants. A meaningful portion of them are experienced brokers who joined businesses that never gave them the systems, the support or the cultural environment to succeed. The experience was there. The environment was not.

When does broker experience genuinely matter?

I am not arguing that experience is irrelevant. Loan writing knowledge, lender panel familiarity, compliance understanding, these things genuinely reduce your onboarding timeline. If you are a sole operator with no capacity to train, then hiring for immediate productivity is a legitimate constraint, not a flaw.

But most brokerages are not in that position. Most of the principals telling me they hire for attitude have a team around them. They have processes. They have an aggregator with training resources. The capability to develop someone is there. What they do not have is a hiring process that actually assesses for the thing they claim to hire for.

If you genuinely hire for attitude, show me the interview questions that test for it. Show me how you assess a candidate’s values, their communication style, their approach to difficult client conversations. Show me how those things are weighted against their years on a CRM. If you cannot, then you are not hiring for attitude. You are hoping for it after the experience box has been ticked.

What should bankers thinking about the switch ask?

For the bankers reading this who are considering the transition: understand that the gap between what a brokerage says it values and what it actually screens for is real, and it is worth probing in an interview. Ask the principal about their last three hires. Ask what their turnover looks like. Ask what onboarding actually involves. A brokerage that genuinely hires for attitude will have specific answers to those questions. One that does not will give you a version of “we’re pretty flexible, just looking for the right person.”

The right brokerage will invest in you because they hired for who you are, not just what you have done. Those brokerages exist. Victoria’s 6.9% turnover rate is proof.

One last thing, though. Do not mistake your background for a shortcut. Experienced brokers built their books without deals landing on their desk. They went out and found them. That sales muscle takes time to develop and you will need it. The compliance knowledge transfers. The hunger has to be earned.