An Interview with Kirk Waldfogel, Model Match, Inc. CEO: ‘We Provide a Complete Recruiting Solution for Managing Activity, Lead Flow and Performance’

“We introduced a new and disruptive model for recruiting success.”

Making good hiring decisions is vital to the success of your business. Your employees are your greatest assets and you need to choose them wisely. Though it’s a critical function, hiring also comes with certain risks and can be expensive and time intensive. Companies are increasingly utilizing staffing agencies to handle this important but risky business sensibly.

Model Match, Inc. is an award-winning, innovative platform that supports individual and team hiring goals for companies in the mortgage and financial services industries. The Model Match recruiting solution incorporates processes, best practices and proven methodologies for sourcing, attracting, hiring, on boarding and retaining production talent. The platform enables its clients to efficiently and effectively manage infilling and strategic growth initiatives by leveraging their best resources, their managers, leadership and internal recruiting departments.

Model Match was incorporated in 2015 and is headquartered in San Clemente, California.

Kirk Waldfogel, Model Match, Inc. CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

A few years back, I was introduced to the leadership team at Hammerhouse Strategic Growth Partners. The team had decades of experience in recruiting within the financial services and mortgage industries. I quickly realized that as successful as they were, Hammerhouse was only touching the surface in the market of recruiting producers with transferrable books of business. In order to successfully help the entire market succeed, we developed a Talent Management Software that incorporated Hammerhouse’s expertise into an easy to use, scalable, recruiting solution.

When we first rolled out Model Match, we were successful in solving many of the challenges of recruiting producers, including contact management, ongoing engagement strategies and increasing leadership’s visibility into recruitment activity. We have continued to provide more value to our customers by adding on services such as:

• Full Service Recruiting. Our recruiting team will identify potential candidates and qualify them on your behalf, provide personalized follow-ups, set up initial meetings, help to negotiate offers and provide post-hire retention support.
• Production Prospector. This service identifies and delivers potential candidates that fit our customers selected business criteria and market needs so they don’t waste time talking to the wrong people.
• Success Coaching. Model Match Success Coaches offer the kind of insights, strategies, and tactical training that comes from decades of recruiting within the mortgage lending industry.
• Model Match University. Model Match University is a live, group training program available to all Model Match users. The curriculum covers 16 recruiting-specific topics via a series of weekly calls.

What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

We listen to our customers! In the first rollout of the TMS, we built a very rigid recruiting structure that we were sure everyone would follow. It was based on the methodologies that the Hammerhouse team was using to successfully recruit for years. While it was a gallant effort, we quickly learned that we needed to apply the same methods in a much more fluid way to ensure our customers’ success. In fact, most of the feature sets that we have rolled out since inception are a direct result of customer feedback. Our Coaching program and MMU were developed because many of our customers weren’t comfortable making cold calls or didn’t understand how their company’s value proposition directly impacts the efficiencies of an originator’s business. Our Production Prospector was developed as many of our clients didn’t know who to call, and our full-service recruiting offering was developed to help foster relationships with candidates and set up meetings on behalf of those clients that needed to accelerate their recruiting efforts.

A company’s behavior is as important as its economic performance or the quality of its products. How do you interpret this saying?

People are at the heart of great companies. The way you treat your employees sets the standard for how your employees will treat your customers. Most of our customer experience is made up with day to day interactions with our employees. The more valued and engaged your employees are directly affects these customer interactions. Creating a strong, valued, happy team will translate into a team that treats customers as valued partners and ensures that the company, as a whole, will behave in a customer-centric fashion.

Trust is a difficult attribute to measure and a delicate dynamic to maintain. How do you maintain this with your clients?

Trust starts and is maintained through every customer interaction. We make it a priority to make sure our sales and marketing team represent our solutions in an upfront and honest fashion. Making sure that the customer fully understands what they are purchasing without any misunderstandings is the foundation for a successful partnership. Post-sale, we have a comprehensive process to make sure our customers are onboarded successfully and start realizing value right out of the gates. Customer success is always central to our priorities. It is mandatory to listen to your customers. We have an ongoing focus on listening and always doing what we say we are going to do. It sounds simple and it really is…creating a true partnership is about setting the correct expectations, always following through, and making improvements based on the customer’s voice.

Where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

Eventually, we see ourselves facilitating – placing the right people in the right jobs no matter the industry. Both businesses and individuals have a perfect Model Match. Helping them to connect will ultimately provide a better work-life balance for individuals and ensure employers are getting the right people for long-term success.

Kirk Waldfogel: A Brief Background

As CEO, Kirk Waldfogel sets the vision and drives overall strategy for Model Match and was recently awarded a Top 10 Talent Management Solution Provider in 2018.

Kirk was selected to participate in the UCLA Anderson School of Management Entrepreneur Program and earned a Most Innovative Product Award at CES in 2003. Recently, his accolades include winning 2014 CTIA Startup Lab; selected as 2014 Telcom Council of Silicon Valley Most Innovative Product, and winner of the 2014 CES AppNation Garage.

Kirk is also an avid pilot and a member of Angel Flights, a non-profit charitable organization of pilots. He uses his airplane and time to provide free air transportation for those who have medical needs, are financially distressed, or in a time-critical, non-emergency situation due to their medical condition.

“Model Match was created as a solution to challenges that exist in the process of recruiting ‘passive’ production/revenue generating talent.”