Best way to pose a skeletal mesh

I have a skeletal mesh which I am posing in an animation blueprint based on the location and orientation of VR MotionControllers. In order to match up the player and mesh orientations, I am recording the bone locations on game load (BeginPlay), assuming that these will give the values for the reference pose. However, it seems to me that the animation blueprint is run before BeginPlay, as the values I’m recording turn out to be the default values for my effector variables. Hence, I am having to copy the location and orientation of the reference pose manually from the skeleton into the default values for my effectors, which is not optimal.

Is there a way to get the bone transforms of the reference pose, or spawn the mesh in the reference pose (for BeginPlay), or turn off the animation blueprint until BeginPlay has completed? Alternatively, is there an approach I can use which doesn’t involve the reference pose explicitly in the calculations?

I came up with an alternate approach, but would still be interested to know how to get information about the reference pose. I came across another event (InitializeAnimation) but this seemed to be before any of the bones had a location.