The way we hire has changed indefinitely, and traditional recruiting methods now hold less value. Recruitment teams are struggling to establish new recruiting methods that help to find the best candidate in a digital environment. And admittedly, this change is here to stay forever. As more employees and employers are experiencing the benefits of shifting to a hybrid or completely remote approach, whilst maintaining or increasing productivity.
As the Covid-19 imposed behavioural changes in business prove to be long-lasting or even permanent, many Fintech companies are under stress on several fronts. That being said, as the broader economy adopts to a complete digital first world, there has been tremendous growth in the use of digital financial services and e-commerce, subsequently increasing the demand for Fintech Talents.
“Fintechs and payments companies need to make staff recruitment a priority as talent pool shrinks”
Demand for tech professionals in the fintech and digital payments sector bounced back strongly after a short pause during the initial Covid-19 restrictions. And with the increasingly high demand, recruiters need to act effectively to attract the right talent in a very competitive market.
Due to the high demand for talent, many European payment and Fintech firms are looking to recruit outside of Europe. Although nearshore locations in the region traditionally offer skills at a lower cost, be aware that competition could drive salaries up. While remote hiring allows hiring managers to access a significantly wider pool of talent, it comes with its challenges and disadvantages.
Without having face-to-face interaction with candidates, trust-building and having reliable processes in place to find the right employee in a virtual environment has never been more important. This article highlights the benefits of remote recruitment, the challenges recruiters face while acquiring talents remotely, and provides recommendations on how to boost confidence in your recruitment process by optimizing your hiring roadmap.
The rapid shift from regular hiring methods to digital ones is arguably a tough challenge for many recruiters, especially when it comes to positions where the energy and presence of the candidate are vital to the job. Let's take a sales representative position as an example. When talking to experienced recruiters, they all expressed how their gut feeling about their face-to-face interaction with the candidate played a huge role in confidently deciding whether that person is the right fit for the position. This sparked the need for changes in the talent acquisition process.
The biggest advantage of remote recruitment is time efficiency. In a formerly "regular" hiring process, the hiring manager needs to consider & align on many factors when planning face-to-face interviews. They have to count additional time for traveling for the candidate and sometimes even the hiring managers themselves.
Aside from the time-saving benefits, remote recruitment has been a major cost saver for both the company and the candidate. The candidate in many cases has to travel across the country and oftentimes even to another country. The costs of traveling then are usually reimbursed by the hiring company and when interviewing multiple candidates, this cost loss can add up quickly.
Aside from the time lost for the planned interviews, there is often lots of time lost in between interviews as it can be difficult to find a time slot that fits the candidate and the multiple people involved in the interviews, leaving up to weeks of lost time between the first and second interviews. Remote hiring has therefore proven to be very time efficient. Our experts have refined and optimized the recruitment process to take 28 days to hire on average compared to the average of 48 days to hire tech talents. Feel free to contact our experts if you’re looking for professional advice on remote hiring. It’s free of charge!
It goes without saying that remote recruitment also has its disadvantages both for the hiring company and the candidate. These challenges require adapting an agile approach for the hiring process, which elevates the need for refining the hiring process.
Many recruitment experts in the payments industry expressed how a video interview heavily restricts their assessment of the candidate on culture fit and just the energy of the other person.
Tracking employees’ performance in a physical office is what many hiring managers are accustomed to. The shift towards having to track new hires’ performances virtually creates a burden for the majority of hiring managers. That being said, remotely monitoring employees’ performance has been around for a long time, and countless companies prove that virtual workspaces and progress monitoring can be just as effective. Automattic, Citrix, and DuckDuckGo are great examples of companies that are operating remotely yet still thriving.
Humans heavily rely on their gut feeling and first impressions when it comes to selecting the right candidate. A survey of over 2,000 hiring managers found that 33 percent decided on whether to hire the candidate based on their first impressions. Understandably, recruiters struggle with being unable to get a good grasp of the person’s energy through a computer screen.
A great tip that our experts recommend to boost the confidence you have in your candidate is to do extended reference checks. Calling multiple companies where the candidate has worked often provides good insight into how the person’s character and professionalism are like within a team.
In order to hire with confidence and appeal to more potential employees, it is essential to truly understand the fears and obstacles your candidates face when they apply for a job remotely.
When some of the biggest companies announced major layoffs and hire freezing, people in the talent market could not help but be worried about being affected by the layoffs. Talents became also hesitant to apply to jobs in fear of being hired only to be laid off 5 months later.
Recruiters need to acknowledge that the candidate should also get the opportunity to get to know the hiring manager and decide for themselves whether there is a good match.
Switching between jobs is already hard as it is for many professionals. Adding the inability to physically meet the team to the already stressful change is oftentimes a factor that drives professionals to steer away from switching jobs remotely even when they are unsatisfied with the current job.
Given that the shift to remote recruitment came at a rather rapid pace, it is almost inevitable that recruiters will make mistakes and have certain misconceptions about this new way of hiring. Recruiters usually have certain standards and criteria which they hold their candidates to such as how the person comes across, how professional they seem etc. These standards should be reshaped in the time of remote recruitment.
The shift from face-to-face to digital interviews calls for a structural change in the interview process and an agile approach. This can mean changes in different stages of the process for different companies. We compiled the most important changes your company can start implementing to boost your confidence in your decision-making and ultimately increase the success rate.
Too often interviewers look at qualities not necessarily related to the actual performance of the job, such as personality, appearance, likeability, and how they handle themselves in the interview. Then their opinions of the applicant are not competency-related but rather peripheral to the job. Having well-structured, job-related interview questions can increase employee retention and employee performance. Being agile requires hiring managers to constantly track and adapt their interviews to find the right balance between job and character-focused questions.
The pandemic has pushed financial and non-financial institutions to digitize their services. This has ultimately caused a surge in demand for talents with experience in payment systems amongst other tech skills. This composes a challenge for recruiters as several other companies are searching for the same talent simultaneously. Expanding the search off-shore allows access to a wider pool of talents.
Reshaping your recruitment process to be consistent throughout the company is key to remain agile. Creating a consistent roadmap that can be applied by every recruiter can include what to scan for, what to be more flexible on, and the most important qualities to look for.
The first day as a new hire can already be stressful as it is. Adding doing all of that through a computer screen from home makes for an unpleasant experience for the employee. Make sure to inform new hires about what to expect and what is expected of them in the first week.
It is common that new hires may experience stressful situations if left to discover everything on their own. This is where the importance of strategic onboarding execution lays. Develop a digital onboarding strategy that includes engaging activities such as a virtual tour of the office where the employee will end up working, or a virtual event with other new hires from different departments where the new hires can share relatable stories and experiences. Check out our Digital Onboarding Blueprint for a detailed guideline to an effective onboarding strategy.
Partnering with talent acquisition firms can help improve the candidate quality, ultimately increasing the success rate. Another benefit of outsourcing recruitment is the reduced time to hire. One of the often-overlooked benefits of recruitment outsourcing is the data that can be gathered throughout the entire process and over multiple hires. Analyzing this information not only allows for real-time reporting and insights which can help with decision making but can offer actionable insight into the efficiencies of an organization’s recruitment methods. This allows for a constantly evolving and improving recruitment process which over time will further improve the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and ultimately, the quality of hires.
Current circumstances pushed companies worldwide to reshape their strategy. Those who desire to stay alive had to digitize their services and learn how to benefit from the shift to an online market. While some industries suffered the results of the pandemic, some of them including the payments industry flourished. Companies need to continue hiring but with a reshaped, approach to remain agile in the digital era. Find the right balance between position and character-based questions to place a strategic hire.
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Remote working is here to stay, so your Digital Employee Onboarding strategy should as well...In the Digital Employee Onboarding Blueprint we cover the following topics:
