Hiring the right talent is now critical for mortgage companies. That’s why we’ve invited Amy Volas, founder and CEO of Avenue Talent Partners, to deliver the keynote address at engage.talent on Feb. 6. Volas is a startup veteran who has closed more than $100 million in revenue over her career and now heads a recruiting firm that helps startups hire the right sales leaders.

Named Sales Hacker’s Most Dynamic Woman in Sales in 2019, Volas won accolades as a top sales performer at Indeed and as a National Account Director for both Yahoo and ZipRecruiter. She has also put together seven-figure deals for companies as diverse as Uber, Wellpoint, United Health Group and McDonalds. At engage.talent she’ll talk about how to understand what candidates really want, particularly for sales roles.

“We are in a sales crisis. We have unemployment at one of the lowest levels in 50 years and sales turnover that’s almost three times as high as any other function. The average tenure of a sales leader is 19 months, and shrinking. The average tenure of an individual contributor in sales is 16 months,” Volas said. “When you look at sales churn, you have to wonder why we work so hard to hire them but we’re ok with losing them. It can kill your business.”

Volas fits right in with past headliners of HousingWire engage events, including Ryan Serhant and Brittany Hodak, who wowed attendees at our engage.marketing summits. Our goal with each engage event is to provide actionable insight from some of the best in the business, and that includes the speakers we feature as headliners. We want people with incredible experience who are right in the middle of the fight, finding ways to succeed despite the tight market. To us, this is much more valuable than someone taking a victory lap that might be 10 years removed from the action.

This perfectly describes Volas, who has worked at every level of sales, and continues to hone her craft.

“I’m a practitioner as well as a business owner: my company grows because of the things I do as a recruiter and entrepreneur. I live in those shoes and walk in those shoes every day, “ Volas said.

Her experience working with startups has given her a view into both the highs and lows of enterprise sales recruiting.

“The whole dynamic of a startup — the goal is to have that unicorn moment of an exit, and you chase that like a drug when have your blood, sweat and tears come to success. When you look at how many succeed versus how many fail — there are so many lessons there, even with the ones that didn’t work out,” Volas said.

Don’t miss the chance to hear from Volas and the other experts we’ve assembled for engage.talent to get the insights you need to recruit and retain the people who will move your business forward. Register here.