If you’re included in the circa-3,000 FinTech companies operating in the UK today, recruitment and talent retention are likely top priorities for you.
The UK FinTech sector is experiencing strong growth, with an estimated 105,000 FinTech jobs expected to make up the industry by 2030. This growth suggests that working with FinTech recruitment agencies to find great FinTech talent is going to become even more important over the next few years.
Of course, there are a range of different ways to acquire talent and scale your business. But given the challenging nature of the post-pandemic job market, and the increasing pressure to find the right person for the job, it’s clear to see why working with a specialist FinTech recruitment agency is a popular approach.
To help you ensure your recruitment and talent retention strategies are successful, we’ve provided this useful guide to working well with FinTech recruitment agencies in 2023 and beyond.
As the industry grows, the need for more FinTech talent grows with it. That means you and your competitors are in a constant battle for the best candidates in the market. As a result, it’s important to be aware of the demand for each role, so you know where to focus your efforts to strengthen your ‘brand’ as a more attractive employer.
FinTech is obviously built on technology-based financial services products. Engineers are some of your most valuable employees, and that means they’re often the most in-demand FinTech jobs.
Whether developing products or services, websites or mobile apps, or back-end internal systems, engineers are – and always will be – crucial to any FinTech business. As competition intensifies, and the market becomes increasingly crowded, you’ll begin to face more challenges with finding, recruiting, and retaining great engineers.
For a modern FinTech company, data is right at the heart of your business. You need to ensure your data and analytics team is made up of experienced, qualified people, otherwise your core processes may be at risk. Not only that, but talented data and analytics specialists can help you identify opportunities to evolve your product, attract more customers, and ultimately grow your business.
With that in mind, these roles are in high demand right now, as more businesses turn to data to find a competitive edge. Recruitment for these positions is difficult, though, as these skills are transferable and applicable across almost every industry right now.
Every business needs a great sales team to grow at scale, so these FinTech roles will always be in demand. But finding and recruiting talented sales people capable of selling your specific product or service, and with the determination to deliver on your ambitious growth targets, is never going to be easy.
With so much of modern business taking place in digital channels today, the demand for great FinTech marketing talent is also on the rise. With so much noise and content fighting for our attention online at every turn, you need to ensure your brand is supported by an effective marketing professional.
It’s important to find and hire the right people for your marketing roles, to ensure the value of your products and services is communicated clearly and given the correct distribution to reach your target audience.
Marketing talent currently comes at a premium, though, and these roles are harder than ever to recruit for. Marketing salaries are increasing and candidates are gaining more power as marketing continues to become increasingly valuable to businesses in today’s digital landscape.
Operations keeps your business running smoothly. These roles are also popular, particularly as start-ups begin to scale, requiring more structure and process to support their workflows. Again, operations skills can be transferable across many industries, making the talent pool deeper but the competition for candidates much more broad as well.
We mentioned in our introduction there are a range of approaches you can take to acquire talent and scale your business. Here, we’ll summarise those in five main methods for attracting great FinTech talent:
As mentioned earlier, you need to develop a strong ‘brand’ as an employer to stand out and remain competitive in the crowded FinTech market today.
This is the brand your business conveys to all the prospective candidates and applicants who might consider working for you. Instead of marketing your products and services to customers, you’re marketing your business to potential employees.
This is a neglected skill among lots of businesses, considering how important it is to successful, sustainable growth. How to build a great employer brand is a topic all on its own, but some steps you can take to improve your own include:
Leading on nicely from the previous point, it’s always beneficial if your current employees are so happy in their roles that they recommend friends and other connections to come and work for the company.
Employees will often refer people they know for relevant jobs if they believe that your business is a great place to work, which will be much more likely if you follow the steps mentioned above.
A tried and trusted approach for recruitment is advertising. This is an effective way to attract FinTech talent in today’s digital-first workplace.
Create advertisements for your jobs and, as mentioned earlier, invest some money in making sure these reach a relevant audience of talented candidates.
You can place these in online job boards and job websites, use digital ads on Google search engine results pages (SERPs), ads on social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, or even more traditional advertising out in the real world.
As your business grows, it may become necessary to establish an internal team responsible for recruitment, dedicated to your talent search, acquisition, and retention.
This approach has its pros and cons. For instance, it’s a much bigger financial investment to build a team of people who will work for you full-time (and that also takes its own recruitment process). However, if you do have your own internal recruitment team, you’ll have a dedicated resource who is absolutely clear on what your business needs and what sort of candidates you’re looking for.
This is probably only necessary once your business grows to a certain size, and has a certain volume of roles that need to be filled. In many cases, that’s post-Series B investment.
As the FinTech sector looks set to experience continued growth, the need to have a reliable recruitment partner, with proven experience and knowledge of the industry, is becoming a higher priority.
This approach involves outsourcing your talent search and acquisition to an expert who will provide specialist services and handle everything for you. This minimises the time and effort required from you, allowing you to continue focusing on your own job and growing your business.
In addition to the points mentioned in the previous section, there are a number of additional advantages to be gained from working with FinTech recruitment agencies for your talent search. These include:
A recruitment agency is a partner dedicated to executing your talent search and recruitment strategy for you. This is what they’ll spend all their time doing, which will vastly accelerate the process in comparison to any of the other options mentioned earlier.
A FinTech recruitment agency has existing processes, systems, talent pools, and proven experience in attracting talent. That means you’re guaranteed to gain access to strong candidates much quicker than you would by working alone.
A recruitment agency will also save you valuable time by screening applicants for you, and filtering out candidates who aren’t qualified before they reach you.
Similar to the previous point, since a recruitment agency is dedicated to their role of searching the job market for FinTech talent, they have deep domain expertise and up-to-date knowledge about all the key factors you need to consider.
A recruitment partner can advise you on the current salaries and necessary experience, help you define your roles, and identify talented candidates who may not have been on your radar.
You can also leverage your recruitment agency’s strategic expertise to help you build a strong, attractive employer brand, making you more likely to attract the top talent in the FinTech industry.
There are plenty of candidates out there who are well suited to new FinTech job opportunities, but aren’t actively applying for new roles. A FinTech recruitment agency can help find these hidden gems and use proven tactics to attract them into your recruitment process.
Passive talent is such a valuable section of the job market, but is often the most difficult to find and connect with. This is an important area where a dedicated recruitment partner can add tremendous value to your business.
There may also be outstanding candidates perfect for your company who you’re not aware of because they’re already employed by your competition.
A valuable skill that any good recruitment agency will provide is head-hunting candidates suitable for specific roles and attracting them away from their current employer.
This is an important tactic in your overall recruitment strategy, particularly when the FinTech job market is still in the fall-out of ‘The Great Resignation’ with the power still very much in the hands of the employee.
A FinTech recruitment agency will provide you with a team of specialists who have proven experience, skills, and strategies to ensure they’re successful.
While you will pay for a service, that will usually be worth the investment when you begin to grow your workforce with talented new recruits who are a good fit for your company and the specific roles they’ve been hired for.
If you decide to take the route of working with a FinTech recruitment agency, a crucial next step is to assess the options available and find a partner who’s a good fit for your specific requirements.
When evaluating the FinTech recruitment agencies you’re considering working with, do plenty of research and conduct due diligence by looking at their websites, Trustpilot, client testimonials, and so on.
Once you’ve done that, and have begun to narrow the options down into a shortlist, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
As mentioned earlier, you need a partner who has an existing understanding of the FinTech market and can provide services specific to your industry.
Perhaps you’re looking for software engineers, or maybe you’re looking to hire for FinTech marketing jobs. These are very different roles, and can often require very different approaches from your recruiter.
You’ll find during your research that FinTech recruitment agencies often organise their services by the types of roles, and will be able to offer specific advice for each area of your business.
Look into things like how long they’ve been in business, how many testimonials they have, what kind of companies they’ve worked with in the past, and use this to determine whether you trust them to do a good job for you.
Some larger recruitment agencies may have junior members of their team and less experienced agents working on some projects. To give yourself the best chance of achieving the results you’re looking for, it’s usually wise to work with a partner who will provide you with someone more senior to manage your talent search.
It’s also important to note that every company is different. Your values, culture, style, and everything else is unique to you, and this will influence your talent acquisition and retention strategy.
When evaluating your options for FinTech recruitment agencies, make sure you speak to them about these key aspects of your own business. You should try to determine whether they align with that agency’s capabilities, expertise, and services.
The key thing to being successful here is to select an agency who is a good fit to work with you specifically, and one who can find the right talent for your business.
Some recruitment agencies will be a good fit and others won’t. To help you identify which agencies might not be the best choice for your FinTech talent search, be aware of some of these common red flags:
Recruitment can have a big influence on the success of your business, particularly in a complex, competitive industry like FinTech. If you want to reduce your risk of failure, and ensure you attract and retain the best possible talent, it’s wise to work with specialist FinTech recruitment agencies to support you in your search.
If you’re currently hiring, book a call with us and we can talk to you about our approach.
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