Talent Misalignment: A Hidden Cost Driver

In many lending organizations, a subtle yet costly issue lingers beneath the surface: talent misalignment.

This occurs when highly paid and skilled employees are tasked with handling low-value, repetitive tasks. As a result, these valuable professionals find their days filled with work that doesn’t fully leverage their expertise or justify their cost.

Why Does Talent Misalignment Happen?
The root cause of talent misalignment lies in outdated technology stacks and rigid, linear workflows. Most traditional systems force employees to follow a sequential path, a holdover from the days of paper-based processes. This structure severely limits the flexibility and efficiency of your team, preventing multiple people from collaborating on different tasks simultaneously.

Let’s Break It Down with an Example:
Consider the process of reviewing an appraisal. An appraisal might involve checking 80 different details. This can range from simple tasks like verifying the correct address to complex ones like assessing the property’s value based on local comps.

In most systems, the entire task list lands on the underwriter’s desk, even though only a few of those checks require their specialized expertise. As a result, your underwriters (often the busiest and most expensive employees) end up stuck doing busy work that could easily be handled by automated systems or lower-level staff.

The Impact of Talent Misalignment

Cost.

When your experts spend their time on trivial tasks, you’re creating a skillset bottleneck in your process. For example, a typical underwriter might only be able to handle two files a day due to this inefficient workload.

Look at your employee base. What percent of their current responsibilities are commensurate to their pay grade? 10% of their work? 50%? 90%?

The fact is, when you can only have one person working on a loan at a time, process tends to dictate giving that person as much to do at one time to reduce handoffs. In turn, responsibilities become bloated with extra work that doesn’t always align with a specific skillset. You then need to hire more of the expensive resources to get that extra work done. Cost goes up.

However, if you could breakdown those bloated touches into smaller tasks, and assign those tasks to the appropriately skilled individual, all of a sudden your high paid, highest skilled resources have a lot more capacity.

If you were to do a talent alignment review, where would you begin?