High Volume Recruiting Strategies for the Financial Services Industry


Like most employers today, banking and other financial organizations are struggling with intense talent competition and a lack of qualified candidates. Automation, mobile technology and big data analytics are being deployed as financial services industry recruiting trends quickly move to digital to engage customers and drive greater efficiency and profitability. (Insurance is headed that way too, but not as fast.) Last year, 75% of Americans banked using mobile apps. As more administrative tasks become automated, financial services recruiters will be working to fill higher value, more strategic roles.

Additionally, because financial institutions must deal with global regulatory standards for privacy and data ownership in addition to domestic regulations to prevent risky behavior, financial services recruiters need highly talented candidates to fill financial and regulatory analyst, compliance officer, and forensic researcher positions. A significant shift to a Millennial customer demographic means greater emphasis on diversity recruiting, bilingual candidates, and a race to keep up with hiring demands for positions like virtual bank teller, digital product manager and customer experience designer.

High Demand for Loan Officers, Bank Tellers, and Customer Experience Job Candidates

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for loan officers is expected to grow by eight percent between 2014 and 2024. This growth is about as fast as the average for all American industries, and should contribute an additional 24,500 jobs. Despite the rise of online and mobile banking, many customers still want to speak with loan officers in person, especially when making significant financial decisions.

All of these factors add up to significant challenges for recruiters trying to fill high-volume positions like loan officers, bank tellers, customer experience professionals, and an new influx of requisitions for highly skilled tech candidates in the financial sector.

High-Volume Recruiting Strategies for Financial Services Positions

As recruiting evolves, we are becoming more of a high-touch, high engagement and relationship driven function that operates more and more every day like a marketing department, focused on touches, responsiveness, and providing resources for our target audience of qualified candidates. It’s imperative for recruiters to focus on targeted strategies to build a large talent pool, as well as nurturing and other hiring funnel activities that give us access to a high number of candidates with experience in financial technology and compliance. Here are just a few areas to focus on when adapting your current recruiting strategy to more efficiently reach a broader audience:

Think like a marketer. Recruiting and talent acquisition leaders can benefit from having a marketing mindset. From creating personas (see the next item) to segmentation, recruiters can take a page from marketing’s playbook to build a healthy talent pipeline. One of the top engagement strategies is to create a channel for communicating with top candidates who weren’t initially selected for hire, particularly considering that many candidates in the financial sector may be working and completing educational requirements at the same time segment out a short list of your top candidates that came close to being hired and set up a content marketing strategy that has more personalized rejection response. You have candidate contact information and this is an excellent opportunity to keep your company relevant to quality candidates and will give you a pool of candidates to reach out to for future hiring needs, something that is highly valuable in high volume recruiting.

Create personas. Good marketers create customer personas, and in recruiting, it can be extremely helpful to map out personas and your candidate journey. Create candidate personas based on typical attributes of the applicants and various points in your hiring funnel. For example, in banking, your job applicant persona is likely Millennial or Gen Z for entry-level positions, in college or just out of college, willing to work part-time, and so on. This isn’t meant to exclude candidates, but to allow you to map out the candidate types you want, specifically focused on engaging communities including those that are protected and diverse.

Email marketing. Once you've closed a position, segment the rest of the promising candidates into a campaign that sends a nurture email once or twice per quarter. Keep the emails simple. Remind people who you and your company are, ask them how they're doing, and make it easy for them to check out your careers page and connect with your company on social media if they want more info. Learn more about candidate nurturing best practices.

Social marketing. Think beyond LinkedIn when creating content for candidates. Because many of your former candidates were likely to have taken positions when they didn’t get hired at your company, they have become “passive candidates,” meaning that they’re less likely to spend time on LinkedIn. Use your other channels, like Instagram and Facebook, to engage candidates with content about what it’s like to work for your company, let them know when you have open positions, and encourage them to share with and refer friends.

Alumni networks. Consider creating a LinkedIn or Facebook group to keep up with your former employees if they performed well and left under positive circumstances. After all, they already know your company culture, and you know them. Turning rehires into a source of employees is easy as well. Make sure that they're treated with respect when they exit, and that you do a great job with communication as they go. Include them on your passive candidate marketing strategy and add them to that email segment. The networking effect is an invaluable low-cost tactic to help elevate your employer brand and keep your hiring funnel well-stocked.

Use paid advertising or targeting. Talroo, in particular, has recruitment marketing tools to help elevate visibility for your job posting and hyper-target qualified candidates. The technology exists and it won’t break your recruiting budget, so using data-driven talent attraction solutions allows you to optimize a paid campaign in real-time, amplifying what’s working and turning off what doesn’t.

Start hiring financial services pros today

Building Candidate Funnels with Recruitment Marketing in Finance and Banking Industries

These marketing-based tools can help raise your profile within talent communities and build strategies that are measurable and scalable. As your company is growing and hiring at a high-volume, candidate nurturing is one area of your hiring funnel that must be active and consistently updated. Recruitment marketing is crucial for high-volume hiring in our current talent marketplace, and since we’re not seeing a downshift in this candidate-driven financial services jobs market, it’s also something that can help you plan for what your company might look like five or 10 years from now.

Topics: Recruiting Strategies

Updated May 7, 2019