<-- Back to Building a Winning Finance Team Series
Cultivating Finance Talent: Where Will Your Future Finance Leader Come From?
Part 1 - Recruitment
Reliable, innovative, and continuous finance leadership. It’s a vital aspect of any organization’s financial success and future growth. Is your organization practicing the kind of rigorous recruitment and development processes it takes to stay rich in internal talent resources? It’s important from both a human resources and a financial perspective to acquire high-potential employees and cultivate their talent.
From the start, time and money are invested in the people you hire. Implementing strong hiring and development processes reduces high-cost turnover, creates a skilled talent pool, and promotes employee contribution and commitment to the company. These practices enable businesses to build leaders from the bottom up
RECRUITMENT
When it comes to finance roles, it can be invaluable to have a leader who has come up through the organization and understands the company inside and out. That’s why recruiting people with the traits and skills to grow and succeed is your first major investment in leadership development. Here are some tips on how to do it right.
Always recruit. When it comes to recruiting highpotential employees and future leaders, timing counts. At any moment an exceptional candidate may cross your company’s path. That’s why there’s never a wrong time to recruit. In fact, it’s always time to recruit. Your HR professionals and finance recruiters must always be working to scout and deliver high-performing stars.
A continuous recruitment push doesn’t mean continuous hiring, but if you are recruiting only when there’s a need, your organization is missing out on establishing relationships with professionals who could make a tremendous business impact. In addition, when recruiters are constantly working to build a store of high-potential candidates, it’s much more efficient and effective to hire from that existing pool of talent than to start from scratch.
Birds of a feather
Finance professionals flock together. Be sure that your organization is participating in and recruiting from the finance organizations and associations that best align with your company’s strategy and talent needs. Career-minded individuals who aspire to management and leadership roles often participate in professional organizations. And because many organizations require accreditation and active membership, you get initial insight into the skills as well as business-related activities of the participating professionals.
Examine track records
High-potential finance employees will have a distinguished “made-saved-achieved” track record. They will have made and saved employers money and achieved notable accomplishments in each of their previous roles. In addition, gifted finance professionals will be adept at promoting organizational peace of mind, establishing controls and checks and balances within their environments to ensure that business assets are protected from overspending, lawsuits, and misappropriation.
In examining track records, also look for consistency of employment. Loyalty and commitment are important traits for leadership and management roles. If candidates have invested significant amounts of time growing and succeeding within other organizations, they are likely to do the same in yours.
Different is good
Don’t always look to recruit the exact same professionals with the same experience, background, education, and focus. While it’s good to have standards, don’t make them so stringent as to weed out experienced talent that can bring new vision and experience to your organization. Diversity and new ideas drive innovation, which is something a business needs at all levels of the organization.
Assess without emotion
Interviewing is a crucial part of the recruiting process, but it does have an emotional, subjective element. To add objectivity to the process, incorporate skills and leadership assessments. Whether using an assessment or a software skills test, the information will allow recruiters and hiring managers to take a step back from personal impressions and evaluate data.
A strong combination of subjective and objective evaluations will create a more balanced recruitment approach. A similar way to increase objective standards is to build a recruitment scorecard and rank candidates based on a variety of benchmarks, such as skills, background, experience, or career goals. Candidates may be further assessed or eliminated from the recruitment process based on a numeric score.
How can we help? Please let us know how we can support you or your business?
_________________________