You already know the difference between a résumé and a record.
So here is the record. Who actually handles your file, what he did before this, and the licence numbers you can check without taking anyone’s word for it.
Ramin Hallaji-Dezfouli
Mortgage broker · British Columbia & Alberta
Officer Financing is not a call centre and not a rotating queue of file handlers. One broker takes the file, and it is the same one who picks up when you call back at nine at night because you have just come off shift.
Check the licence yourself
More than a decade of shift work, then a licence.
Ramin started in the oil fields out of Grande Prairie at nineteen — days, nights, +40° summers, −50° winters, hundred-hour weeks, three kids at home. If you have worked rotating shifts with a family waiting on you, none of that needs explaining.
In July 2019, visiting family in BC and still working the rigs, he sat in a brokerage office in front of a wall of top-producer plaques and thought: maybe I can do this one day. The broker across the desk — Asim Ali, one of Canada’s top-volume brokers — told him that if he brought oilfield hours to this industry he would make it, and offered to mentor him.
He worked the fields until February 2020, was licensed that November, and started as a broker in January 2021. His first approval went in ten days later. The arc has since come full circle: the broker who was mentored on nights and weekends now mentors brokers across British Columbia.
“There’s only success. The rest is excuse.”
The full story is on the Broker Collective podcast, episode 102 — “From Oil Fields to Mortgages”.
Judged the way you are — on what actually happened.
- 2019Working the rigs out of Grande Prairie. Sat in a brokerage office on a trip to BC and thought: maybe I can do this one day.
- 2020Left the oil fields in February. Licensed 25 November.
- 2021Started as a broker in January — first approval submitted ten days later. First-year target $100,000. First-year result $154,000 — and not a missed pay period since.
- 2022DLC Top 50 by monthly revenue at exactly twelve months in the business. CMP Rising Star of Canada.
- 2023DLC Diamond Award — top 5% of the network.
- 2025DLC Master Club — top 5% of more than 4,000 brokers nationally.
Eleven national distinctions between 2021 and 2025, earned at Mortgage Guru Financial.
A pay stub that confuses a lender is not a credit problem.
Uniformed pay is not shaped like the salaried income a lender’s system expects. Shift differentials, overtime that is mandatory rather than optional, court time, callouts, acting pay, isolation and hardship allowances — all of it is real, recurring income, and all of it gets discounted or dropped by an underwriter reading a file quickly.
Add a transfer between detachments, a deployment, or a probationary period that looks like a job change on paper, and a perfectly strong applicant starts getting answers that make no sense to them.
That is the whole reason for a separate desk: knowing which lenders count which parts of that income, and documenting it properly the first time rather than appealing a decline afterwards.