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Recruiting tips for financial services – how to find talent in a super competitive market

Date Posted: 3 November, 2022
Recruiting tips for financial services – how to find talent in a super competitive market

 

Competition for talent within the financial services sector is blisteringly fierce right now. This makes it even more crucial that employers sharpen their hiring skills.

According to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the industry had 5+ unfilled vacancies per 100 jobs between April and June 2022. It’s the third worst in the UK for filling job vacancies, only just behind IT and Communication, and Accommodation and Food Services.

With this tough hiring environment in mind, here are just a few of the ways that financial services employers can get ahead:

  1. Work on your employer brand

Finding and attracting the talent you need isn’t just about offering the highest salaries or writing eye-catching job ads. It’s just as crucial to showcase yourself as a fantastic employer to work for. This means improving your employer branding.

It can be extremely tough to compete with up-and-coming fintechs, whose brand image is likely to be fun, engaging and youth-orientated. But you need to find your own USP, then develop strong messaging techniques to ‘sell’ your company when hiring. It’s all about marketing which targets your ideal candidates.

Here’s a handy tip to remember from Matthew Jeffrey, Global Head of Sourcing at SAP:

“Recruitment IS marketing. If you’re a recruiter nowadays and you don’t see yourself as a marketer, you’re in the wrong profession.”

  1. Get strategic

If you’re hiring for financial roles without a recruitment strategy, you need to go right back to the drawing board. Having targeted strategies in place helps you to fill current roles effectively, as well as developing a large talent pool and future pipeline of qualified candidates.

You need to be planning ahead and identifying future need, so that you can scale up and meet capacity as the business grows.

  1. Have a graduate recruitment pipeline in place

When there’s a shortage of skilled candidates out there in the market, graduates could be the solution – and you need to snap up the best talent before everyone else does.

This is where a graduate recruitment strategy can come in helpful. This involves working with local educational facilities to develop partnerships, and start initial attraction programmes well before graduation day. Get it right and you can grow your own talent – or at least nurture it.

  1. Make inclusivity and diversity a top priority

Candidate shortages are a very real problem within financial services. So with this in mind, why wouldn’t you expand your reach to as wide a potential talent pool as possible?

Implementing inclusive recruitment principles can ensure you fill job roles, as well as creating a welcoming work environment that new hires actively want to join. You’ll fill your company with new ideas, diverse perspectives and be able to build a brand reputation as an inclusive place to work.

  1. Start an employee referral program

The last tip is perhaps the simplest to implement. If your team loves working for you, they’re your ideal brand ambassadors. Employee referral programmes are a tried-and-tested way to reach new talent, especially if you’re trying to engage younger generations.

Need more help hiring? Try a targeted approach with our specialist recruiters here at RGH – get in touch to start your search.

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