Managing Finance Recruitment in Your Company

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Dedicated finance recruitment and headhunter firms can help you attract and hire the right talent where it’s needed.

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Hiring for Your Financial Services Teams

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Hiring for Your Financial Services Teams

What to Know When Hiring for Your Financial Services Teams

Financial services recruitment can be difficult, especially in a world full of fraud, scams, and untrustworthy individuals. When you are looking to add data scientists, risk analysts, financial analysts, or accountants to your team, there are several steps to help you choose a good candidate. 2022 is a great year to look for new hires, as many people are looking for change in their jobs or may be seeking new employment. Hiring the right person with the talents you are seeking is a great way to set your business up for success. 

Hiring A Financial Services Team Member

Depending on the type of financial role you are trying to fill, take into account what qualifications you are seeking. A financial manager is responsible for the health of your business! Taking into consideration the kind of person you will need is key. Hiring a financial advisor can be difficult, so it is important to lay out what you would want your financial manager to do before you start the hiring process. It is much easier to find a candidate you want when you are prepared with a job description and your desires.  

What Does a Financial Services Job Entail?

As mentioned before, a financial manager would be responsible for the overall health of your company. Some other unique responsibilities might include: 
  • Fraud monitoring: A fraud specialist may be in charge of tracking and monitoring illegal transactions on clients’ accounts without proper authorization from the account owner. Fraud specialists may also report any suspicious account movements and unusual transactions that may be risky to the bank and/or their clients. 
  • Train and develop staff to create a great customer experience.
  • Delegating tasks to various employees.
  • Developing strategies to increase sales and retention
And that’s just the beginning! Financial services recruitment always comes down to finding someone you can truly trust. Completing those responsibilities in a timely and organized manner is important, but trusting that person with keeping your books and avoiding any issues with your finances is even more important. It is essential to identify a candidate who can work well with you, manage their responsibilities, and be trustworthy. 

How to Find a Good Candidate

Once you have identified what exactly you are looking for, you need to put out an accurate job description. Whether you hire a recruiter or post a job listing, be clear on what you want. Are you seeking an applicant with several years of experience? Would you like for them to have a degree? Make it clear in your listing what you are willing to accept from a candidate. Then, be open to candidates who fit the basics. Remember that years of experience don’t always make an individual trustworthy. The hiring process is one of the most difficult parts of running a business, but once you hire the right candidate, your business will thrive. The main steps to hiring someone in financial services are simple: 
  1. Building the job description – how to make your job opening more attractive than the others flooding the job boards? There are a finite number of candidates and it is important to create a job description that is appealing and unique. This is a critical step and needs to be executed well. 
  2. Reaching out proactively to candidates – in this candidate-driven market, you can’t wait for the best talent to come to you. In this market, employees are less driven to search for jobs when people may be recruiting them already. Good candidates are hired quickly. Get ahead of it by proactively reaching out.
  3. Screening candidates thoroughly, yet quickly– how do you make sure you’re hiring the RIGHT person without losing them to other offers? Candidates will often accept a role that they find gratifying and well-paying. If your process is slow or cumbersome, then you will have likely lost out on any number of great people. 
This may seem easy, but it can be hard if your applicants are not what you are seeking. This can happen for a number of reasons. You may not have a good job listing or an accurate description of the requirements of the job. Maybe your area is lacking in people who are qualified. Perhaps you need your job filled quickly, as the current employee might be leaving soon or already has left. This can make this process even more complicated.  You will want to ask for referrals from your best workers or use a better job seeking site to post on. Finding a trustworthy candidate is absolutely essential, and unfortunately, people sometimes lie on their resumes. 

Why Use a Recruiting Agency

Let’s face it, hiring a great candidate is an exhausting and time-consuming process. Hiring is just one of many aspects of a manager’s role, and it is a different type of effort than what a manager is accustomed to doing on a daily basis. Managers often have strong skills in many areas aside from hiring though. When it comes to financial recruitment, a recruiting agency takes a lot of the stress and worry out of hiring. Most people running a business find it difficult to take the time to hire and vet resumes while still accomplishing all they need to get done. A recruiting agency should go above and beyond for you to help you find the perfect applicant. 

Good Recruiters Matter

Experienced recruiters who truly care about finding a great hire are key when it comes to financial services recruitment. Finding a great fit has a lot to do with knowing the available applicants well. A good recruiter knows their candidate inside and out. They know their job history, their strengths and weaknesses, and their trustworthiness. They’ve already done the reference and background checks, and they know what kind of job their candidate wants. Then, they bring them to your business, fully vetted. All the groundwork done. 

Relationship-based Recruiting

Good recruiters get to know the candidates, and they get to know you and your business. They ask all the right questions to know exactly what you might be looking for. Let’s say you are seeking an experienced credit analyst with at least 5 years of experience, but the applicant having an MBA isn’t as important to you. Your recruiter can work through their pipeline of talent – some of whom are actively looking for new jobs, and many of whom are not – and get you interviewing with better candidates, faster than if you wait for applications to come in. Simply posting a job and resting on your laurels while waiting on resumes just does not work any longer. You will certainly miss out on a number of great people by not being proactive. Proactive outreach is more critical now than ever. 

Financial Services Recruitment

Recruiting a financial services team can be difficult, but it is possible to find a new hire who can complete your team and help you in your company mission. A great way to make it easier on yourself and your team is to hire a recruiting company to find you the perfect match! Reach out today to Brightwing and we can help you find the perfect candidate. 

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5 Top Tips for Landing Great Talent in Today’s Competitive Market

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5 Top Tips for Landing Great Talent in Today’s Competitive Market Right now, the talent market is flooded with opportunities for job seekers. In fact, as the market stands right now, there are way more opportunities than candidates. This is pretty much the case across all sectors.  You may be acutely aware of this struggle right now. You may be struggling to find great, experienced talent for all your open positions. If this is the case, you need to change your approach to recruiting, interviewing, and job offers.  Luckily, we’ve had some successes in this area recently, and can offer some first-hand advice. So here are five things you can do today to stand out in this competitive job market.  

1. Define your ideal candidate. 

  If you want to effectively compete for a certain type of candidate, you have to first define who that candidate is and why they’re a good fit for your organization. Otherwise, you’ll spend time and resources chasing the wrong people, wasting both your time and theirs.  To do this effectively, you need to go beyond the standard demographics that everyone looks at: years of experience, qualifications, seniority level, etc. While important, these give you a one-dimensional understanding of the candidate.  Here are some questions you can ask to try and go deeper: 
  • Is this a role that will be actively managed, or do they need to be self-reliant?
  • Can this role function as a remote or hybrid, or does it require someone willing to be in the office full-time?
  • Can you accommodate on-the-job training, or do you need someone fully qualified and ready to hit the ground running from Day 1? 
Ultimately, you want to understand not just who the person is, but how they work and what their priorities are. This will provide clarity, whether you’re searching for and screening candidates yourself, or working with a recruiting firm like Brightwing.   

2. Position your organization to attract your ideal candidate.  

  Once you’ve defined your ideal candidate, the next step is to position your company so that you’re the kind of place where that person would want to work. In a market that’s flooded with opportunity, job seekers have the luxury of being choosy. If you want to stand out among the other banks and financial institutions out there, you have to have a “hook” that draws them to your company — and away from your competitors.  There are a number of factors that come into play here:
  • Brand recognition
  • Reputation
  • Manager/supervisor
  • Special projects
  • Company/office culture
The specific factors you’ll want to emphasize will depend entirely on who your ideal candidate is, and the things they value most. If you’ve effectively defined your candidate (per the previous section),  you’ll have a clearer idea of what to prioritize as you market the role.  

3. Offer upskill & career pathing opportunities. 

  When career professionals accept a given role, they aren’t taking it because of what it’ll offer them right now. They’re thinking more strategically, about how that role will drive their career forward.  As a result of the talent shortage, many savvy professionals are seeing this as the perfect opportunity to find an opportunity that better suits their long-term goals.  This could mean upskilling in certain areas to stay ahead of shifting trends in the market, especially among engineers and IT professionals. It could also mean that they’re ready to start taking on more leadership roles and becoming managers.  In either case, if you want to stand out and attract great talent, you need to provide them with opportunities to move their careers forward. If not, they’ll simply go with another organization who will.   

4. Create flexible work environments. 

  For many, COVID-19 was the perfect opportunity to reset and spend more time at home with family. This inevitably resulted in a shift in priorities, causing the desire for remote work to go through the roof. If you can offer remote work opportunities, you’ll have a leg up when it comes to attracting quality candidates.  However, having a 100% remote work environment may not be feasible for you. But you can still create more flexible work environments by allowing hybrid office experiences, flexible PTO, and other benefits that can help promote a greater work-life balance.   

5. Designate an internal salesperson. 

  This final tip is one that a lot of employers skip over; which is unfortunate, since it’s probably the one that’s most important. After you’ve defined your ideal candidate, positioned your organization, and highlighted the available opportunities, you need to actually sell the candidate on the experience of working with you. That means that you need someone to function as your internal salesperson. Now this person could be the hiring manager. But if your hiring manager isn’t a natural salesperson, you may need someone to come along and help them during the interview process. If a candidate doesn’t get excited about working with you, odds are they’re not going to take the job.   

Conclusion: Be clear about what you have to offer. 

  Different candidates have different motivations. Some want opportunities to push themselves and upskill, others want a dynamic company culture, and others want flexibility.  Attracting quality candidates requires that you become crystal clear on what you’re looking for, and what you have to offer them, and whether that fits with their own career goals. So it’s important that you be very clear on what you have to offer them and whether that’s going to be a good fit. If you have a competitive offer for the candidate, and you’re able to effectively communicate that offer, you’ll certainly stand out from the competition. Only then will you be able to attract the best candidates in your territory. 

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Why the Financial Services Job Market is Ripe for Opportunity

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Why the Financial Services Job Market is Ripe for Opportunity BY KIM LEWIS Senior Recruiter Is my job offering me everything I want in my career? Or is there another role out there with more opportunity? If you’re asking yourself this question, you’re not alone. According to CNBC, 25 percent of workers are considering quitting their jobs once the pandemic fully subsides. When it comes to considering a job change, especially for financial services workers, a number of factors come into play:
  • Compensation & benefits
  • Job security & upward mobility
  • Office culture
  • Upskill opportunities
If you think that you’re starting to plateau in your current role and need a change, this is the perfect time to do it. As the consumer market booms in response to the COVID-19 recovery, there are jobs opening up across all areas of loan servicing: approvals, operations, accounting, financial analysis, reporting & data science, risk analysis, BI, and more. This is the case not just in banks, but other organizations that have in-house loan officers, like automotive dealers. So if COVID-19 made you wonder “what’s next?” or “where am I going from here?”, take a look at these reasons why now is the right time to jump into the financial services job market.  

New culture.

  With all of the shifts and changes from last year, many companies had to come up with creative ways to maintain their culture in remote environments. Since people weren’t physically in the office, the natural connections and relationships that form in those situations just didn’t happen. On the other hand, many people thrived in remote environments and worked more productively while at home. As a result, you may have come to understand more about the specific type of culture that works for you:
  • More flexible cultures that allow more work-from-home opportunities and work-life balance
  • “Work hard play hard” environments where everyone is in the same office, hustling together
  • Traditional offices where everyone is available for meetings, but you’re able to buckle down and get your work done
  • 100% remote environments, allowing you to work wherever you want and makes the most sense for your family
Ultimately, the goal is to find the organization that treats you well and provides the work environment that you’re looking for. If you aren’t finding that at your current job, then take advantage of the current state of the market and go find it elsewhere.  

Better compensation.

  There’s a reason we say that “money talks.” Compensation certainly isn’t the only reason to take a new job. But if you feel like your earning potential has stagnated at your current company, now would be a great time to see if there’s a better opportunity out in the market. Thanks to labor shortages and other factors, many companies are offering signing bonuses and other incentives for new employees to come on board. While a signing bonus isn’t the only reason to jump on board with a new company (after all, it doesn’t make up for a bad fit), it’s at least reason enough to start looking. But if you can find a better fit and get a boost in compensation out of it, you may be able to snag a “best of both worlds” situation.  

More security.

  The acquisitions happening among various banks have caused some anxiety among financial services workers, which is to be expected. Acquisitions are a double-edged sword. They can be a good thing and lead to new opportunities, or they can result in consolidations and layoffs, depending on the situation. If you’re in the middle of one of these acquisitions, and wondering whether your job will be secure in 6-12 months, then now is a great time to start looking for a job with more security. Keep in mind, however, that there’s no such thing as true job security. Even if you find a great new role, you never know if that bank will be acquired and you’ll be in the same situation. Given the volatility in the market, this is why some financial services professionals are looking to independent contractor opportunities and other more flexible work, in addition to full-time career roles. But if you face an uncertain future, market conditions are perfect for you to go and negotiate a more stable position.

Upskill opportunities.

  We’ve all been in jobs that no longer challenge us, and where we feel there’s no growth opportunity. It’s possible that you find yourself in that position right now. If you’ve truly exhausted all the growth opportunities in your current company, the worst thing you can do for your long-term trajectory is to stay in that role. Fortunately, there’s no time like the present to see which upskill opportunities are available in the financial services job market. As we mentioned earlier, a lot of banks are expanding their departments. If you want to niche down into a particular skill set, finding one of those newly formed roles would be a great place to start. If you’re looking to grow into a manager or leader, these expansions are opening up new leadership opportunities, making now the perfect time to level up. These opportunities aren’t just inside traditional banks. Many companies hire finance employees in-house, where they handle the manufacturing, servicing, and crediting under one roof. This is especially common among auto dealers, as well as FinTech companies, who need people with finance backgrounds to help them build their technology most effectively.  

Conclusion: Know why you’re looking for a change.

  There are a host of reasons why a change may be a good idea. The question you need to ask yourself is: why are you looking for a change? When you can identify what’s important to you and what your priorities are, that will drive your next step. All of the factors we mentioned above are great, but you need to find the one that you’re specifically looking for. From there, see if you can find another opportunity that will meet that. And there isn’t a better time to try and find those opportunities than now. So go ahead and jump in.   If you want to look for a new opportunity but aren’t sure where to start, the Brightwing team is here to help. Contact us to set up a one-on-one conversation.

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