# Matt Hill

Matt Hill recruits leaders and loan officers in the mortgage industry. They write about values-driven recruiting, leadership, and building teams that support the people and families behind the business.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/matt-hill/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthillvertical
- LinkedIn followers: 13,400
- Topics: leadership, recruiting
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-09-24

## Summary

Matt Hill is useful for LinkedIn content on values driven mortgage recruiting and leadership, not reach buys.

- Best for: A mortgage recruiting or leadership development firm wanting LinkedIn content and an optional event speaking slot.
- Not for: A lender brand team wanting consumer mortgage rate or refinancing ads with guaranteed impressions and geographic targeting.
- Check first: Ask for sponsorship formats, rate card, terms, recent engagement, follower geography, and audience role data.

### Takeaways

- Hill used fake job postings as a recruiting tactic and reflected on the moral cost.
- Hill asks leaders to explain past failures and how those failures affected other people.
- Hill challenges people first slogans with maternity leave questions about files, pay, and client calls.

## Main ideas

- **Company design, not culture slogans, decides whether working parents can stay in production**: Hill argues that “people first” and “culture matters” statements are worthless if the underlying structure forces an originating mother to keep working through maternity leave. Values are not the problem; design is. The operational test: what happens to a file when they are not the one touching it, who gets paid, and where their clients' calls go. Hill says most people in the industry have never sat down to answer these structural questions, and is working on designs to share.
- **Portfolio-style hiring treats families as acceptable losses**: Hill contrasts lenders who hire like a private-equity portfolio—if six of ten work out, they are ahead—with a model that treats every loan officer as a family and a story, sharing responsibility for that person's ability to provide and succeed. The objection is not to the arithmetic but to what it treats as normal: collateral damage to families and individuals. Hill says playing that game started changing who they wanted to be, and directs the criticism at the model rather than the people running it.
- **Screen leaders by how easily they discuss their own failures**: Hill's integrity test before joining a platform or leader is: “Do I believe you'll do what is right, even when it costs you something?” The observable signal is whether a leader can readily discuss past failures and articulate how other people were affected—a sign, in Hill's view, of emotional intelligence, growth and maturity. Age guarantees none of it; Hill presents the standard as one earned the hard way, not easily met.
- **Build with high-EQ operators who want the authority and resources to build something**: Hill's stated criteria for leaders and teams they want to recruit are high emotional intelligence, elite business operation and a willingness to sacrifice themselves for the good of others. Hill acknowledges such people “don't grow on trees” and uses a single question to find them. When the company you want to exist does not, Hill argues, you have to build it.
- **Measure LinkedIn by conversations, not reach**: Hill treats LinkedIn as a source of recruiting conversations rather than an audience metric, and says complaints about weak organic reach and poor engagement do not matter to that goal.

## Work to read

- [The fake job posting that taught Hill what to screen leaders for](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthillvertical_a-recruiting-firm-i-used-to-work-with-taught-activity-7501673608419889152-1Zp7)
- [Why Hill stepped away from mortgage for a few years](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthillvertical_many-lenders-operate-with-a-private-equity-activity-7508950544569417728-l_n_)
- [The question Hill asks leaders before joining them](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthillvertical_the-recruiting-process-is-deeply-personal-activity-7508213123258994689-Ha3q)
- [The maternity-leave gap behind “people first” slogans](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthillvertical_we-say-people-first-we-say-culture-matters-activity-7506029895672635392-upke)
- [Hill’s short argument for posting on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthillvertical_had-4-awesome-recruiting-calls-today-all-activity-7508658976188678145-PsPk)

## Brand relationships

- **Radiant** (employment)
- **Salesforce** (mention)

## Partnerships

The posts describe no sponsorship, brand-partnership, or paid-collaboration format. Matt Hill's posts offer recruiting and leadership commentary for mortgage industry leaders and loan officers, explaining how they evaluate companies and the people they want to build with—not commercial offers to brands. The only contact route they point to is direct messaging on LinkedIn, where they invite leaders and originating mothers to send a message or reply in the comments. The posts include no media kit, rate card, sponsorship policy, audience demographic sheet, or partnership inquiry page. Brands considering sponsored content or a hiring-adjacent speaking engagement should confirm scope, deliverables, and terms directly before planning around them.

## Alternatives

- Justin Neal: Choose Neal over Hill when the partnership needs to speak to loan officers themselves — originators deciding where to take their production — and the buyer wants the AI-and-automation angle in the same package. Neal writes directly to that audience. One post explains generative engine optimization for mortgage bankers: how AI tools like ChatGPT search YouTube, Google Business Profiles and Facebook business pages, and look for reliability, availability after hours and reviews that prove it, with the stated goal of becoming the top-recommended mortgage banker in a named Minnesota market. A second post walks through a fully automated daily health logger built with Zapier, Shortcuts and Airtable — voice-logged meals, calorie and protein calculations, Apple Health step syncs, a nightly text summary — pitched at loan officers who are too busy serving clients to look after themselves. The posts also carry recruiting lines, such as "For mortgage LOs exploring what's next — this is the kind of forward-thinking, growth-oriented culture we bring to our team every day." If the need is a recruiting pitch to working originators and the differentiator is being technically ahead, Neal's posts are closer to the deliverable than their leadership-screening argument.
- Tom McMakin: Choose McMakin when the buyer wants the training method, not the recruiting argument. One post recounts a business-development call that nearly went wrong: McMakin arrived ready to ask about the proposal, asked instead how the quarter had gone and what the lieutenant felt proud of, learned the hardest part was getting practice professionals to write thought leadership, and left with a natural opening to send examples of that work. The lesson — stop talking about what you want to talk about and start asking what the person you want to serve is trying to get done and what keeps them from it — is the same consultative move a recruiting firm sells to hiring leaders, delivered as a worked story the buyer can adapt. A second post shares a two-day consulting workshop curriculum from a colleague: niche selection, ideal-client profiling, a discovery offer, value-based fees and an example daily marketing plan. If the partnership is about teaching recruiters or account leads to hold better conversations, this is closer to a curriculum than Hill's posts.
- Paul Garwood: Choose Garwood when the recruiting audience is the candidate rather than the hiring leader — early-career people deciding who to sign with — and the message is that character and engagement, not raw numbers, create opportunity. Two posts make that case in NIL terms. One argues that an athlete with 5,000 highly engaged followers can be worth more to a brand than one with 50,000 passive followers, and lists what brands actually want: professional representation, communication, authentic content, genuine audience relationships and credibility that influences purchases. The other says college coaches recruit habits more than statistics — how athletes communicate with teammates, respond to adversity, accept coaching and carry themselves on the bench — and treats trust as the deciding factor in a scholarship decision. A mortgage firm recruiting young originators, or one whose pitch is developing people rather than buying production volume, can use that frame directly.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/