6 Ways to Retooling your Recruitment Process

By Ian Reseigh

December 3 2015 - For financial services recruiters, hiring new staff and replacing existing ones can be an expensive process. In fact, according to research commissioned by Unum, it costs the average business more than £5,000 to replace a single employee and more than £25,000 to train the new recruit to their optimum productivity level.

With such significant costs involved, it is important that the recruitment process itself is as strong as possible. However, at present, almost half of all new recruits fail within 18 months of employment. Below, we provide six ways in which you can retool your financial recruitment process, to give you the best chance of success.

1. Provide Internal Opportunities

All too often, recruiters feel as though they have to look outside of their company to replace staff, especially in senior positions. Yet, in many cases, financial services recruitment can take place internally, giving your most reliable staff members the chance to progress up the ladder and advance their careers.

Opportunities can be given in the shape of a formal promotion, or an expansion of a person's responsibilities. Generally, recruiting from within also improves staff motivation levels and reduces staff turnover rates.

2. Use Pre-Employment Personality Assessments

If you do decide to advertise the vacancy externally, it is important that you aim to find not only the best qualified candidate, but the person with the right personality. One way to make this easier is to issue pre-employment personality assessments, so you can learn more about the person behind the application.

This technique is being used by more and more businesses, including Fortune 500 companies. In addition to helping to identify pre-requisite behaviours in candidates, it can also serve to reduce recruiter bias.

3. Write a Clear Job Description

Financial services positions can require very specific knowledge or experience levels, and interviewing applicants who are not sufficiently equipped to carry out the role is a waste of time, money and numerous other resources. This problem can be significantly reduced by getting your job description right.

A good job description should make it clear exactly what the position entails and what sort of person could occupy it. Ideally, it should also display elements of your company's brand values and culture.

4. Make Sure You Structure the Interview

As you begin to interview candidates, you will find out that every interview is unique. Nevertheless, you will want to try to steer each interview in the same basic direction, so that you cover all of the necessary topics. For this reason, establishing an interview structure can be extremely helpful.

Your interview should assess suitability based on criteria established in your job description and person specification. Asking the same questions and following a set structure allows you to do this while also maintaining fairness.

5. Create a Hiring Scorecard

Humans are predisposed to bias, so recruiter bias is something of an inevitability. However, the best recruitment processes try to minimise the influence of bias as much as possible. One proven way to do this is by creating a hiring scorecard, in order to assess the strengths and weaknesses of candidates.

Record things like experience, education and qualifications numerically and then examine the scores. Again, this method provides a level of consistency and structure to the process, while also making direct comparisons easy.

6. Constantly Seek Talent

One of the biggest reasons for poor hiring decisions is a lack of time, and this problem is often caused by an urgent need to fill a vacancy. If recruiters feel pressured or rushed, they are more likely to deviate from the established recruitment process and more likely to exercise poor judgement.

In reality, successful financial services companies don't wait for vacancies to arise. Instead, they are constantly on the lookout for new and talented people, who are able to make a valuable contribution.

Author Bio

Ian is the founder of Pure Resourcing, a specialist mortgage recruitment firm in the UK. He has been working in the financial services recruitment industry for over 20 years and enjoys keeping a close eye on how economic trends influence the financial services industry. Feel free to connect with him on twitter.

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