…but it might seem like it if you’re looking in the wrong places.
The financial services sector has grown rapidly over the last decade, creating new opportunities for talented individuals looking to enter the field. Yet, despite its growth, the industry continues to face challenges such as high attrition rates and a lack of diversity. However, there is no genuine talent shortage in finance, in fact, the number of job openings in the sector has grown by 3% over the past few years. There is plenty of opportunity for both companies and candidates; the challenge lies in connecting the two.
What You Put In Is Not Always What You Get Out
Let’s say your business decides to handle a hire yourself. By the time you’ve gained sign-off and written the role brief, person specification, and an advert requiring HR approval, a week or more has likely gone by. By the end of week two, HR may have advertised your vacancy on job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn. A few weeks after that, 23 applications land on your desk for review.
Now four to five weeks have passed. You spend a considerable amount of time assessing each CV and providing detailed feedback, and at best the candidates score five or six out of ten. In most cases, a candidate has some of the relevant skills but the wrong work history, they may have worked in the right vertical but never done the actual role you need, or done the role but in a different vertical, with a different sales cycle and no contacts in yours. Either way, the exercise takes real time and leaves you no further ahead.
Naturally, HR or the resourcing team pushes you to see at least a few candidates just to be sure, and you reluctantly agree. By now it’s the end of week four or five, and you’ve scheduled three video calls with candidates you weren’t especially excited about to begin with, so you go in already unconvinced.
Once the calls are done, you report back to the internal team that none of the candidates are broadly suitable, along with notes for HR to pass on. You schedule a follow-up call, revisit the brief, and discuss what else can be done to find the right person.
At this point, one of two things usually happens: the role gets re-advertised in the hope the right person sees it this time, or it’s handed to an external partner. If a business can fill a vacancy internally, through promotion or a known contact, that route is always worth exploring first. But when a role is rare, highly specialised, or has proven historically hard to fill, it’s worth turning to the network and proactive outreach of an executive search partner.
This is where niche-specific talent acquisition consultants like Resilient Management Solutions come in. Our team handles the tedious headhunting process so you get the best candidate for your vertical. Benefit from more than twenty years of industry expertise and an active contact database, while we find what your company needs.
Job Boards Will Get You Many Applicants, But Not the Applicants You Need
Ideally, you want to attract the attention of the right people in your vertical, not everyone currently job-hunting. Job boards may deliver higher volumes of candidates, but often lack quality: based on our clients’ experience, 95% of applications sourced through online channels aren’t properly qualified. Social media can drive traffic to your site, but that traffic doesn’t necessarily convert into candidate leads or applications.
A talent acquisition consultant does more than fill a role, they help shape the brief and advise on the remuneration and package needed to attract the right person, and they’re motivated to deliver strong choices because their reputation and ongoing partnership with your company depend on it.
They also build a genuine understanding of your company culture, and proactively approach candidates who aren’t actively job-hunting but might be open to the right move, one that adds real value to their career. The result isn’t just the right hire: it’s someone with the embedded knowledge and skills to hit the ground running, while quietly loosening your competitors’ grip on your target market.
Five Talent Acquisition Challenges Facing Firms Hiring New Talent
- A shortage of candidates with specific vertical knowledge
- Too many applicants for a given advert, with most unsuitable
- Candidates being assessed for multiple roles at once, working the odds against you
- Requested salaries outside your range, or candidates disappearing before you can hire
- Counter-offers being accepted, forcing you to start the process again
Where you might once have found six or seven strong CVs for a role, today you’re lucky to find one or two, the market simply lacks a deep pool of qualified, professional candidates, especially within a niche.
Every business faces its share of hiring challenges, and hopes things even out over time. As companies compete harder for the best talent, many are rethinking working schedules to offer more flexibility.
Counter-Offers
Financial services talent acquisition faces its own particular challenge here: the counter-offer, arriving just when you think you’ve found the right candidate.
Employers often argue that money isn’t the real issue, yet many candidates still look elsewhere regardless of the counter. In the majority of cases where a candidate does accept a counter-offer, it’s on the promise of a new team, a promotion, a new role, or greater flexibility — but the fact that so many of these same candidates are back on the job market within three to six months suggests those promises are rarely kept.
Genuine internal promotion, respect, creative freedom, room to grow, and a dynamic, mature culture are what companies need to foster — and to communicate clearly to prospective staff. Show new talent how they can benefit the business, and give them room to prove it. Addressing the issues that push candidates away will give you a far better chance of securing the best people.
For unique, hard-to-fill, or niche roles, it’s often better to partner with a financial services or fintech executive search specialist, who will invest the time and use their network to solve your resourcing challenges, so you can focus on running a productive business.
Leverage Resilient Management Solutions’ twenty-plus years of expertise in asset, automotive, and equipment finance and fintech talent acquisition. We believe it’s not about working harder, it’s about working differently, with innovation at the centre of everything we do.
