Hiring Talent
An area that we are regularly asked about is hiring the right people. This is an issue that is very relevant to many of the financial advisors who use Financial DNA, as well as some of our corporate, family and entrepreneurial clients. Even some students, who we provide development programs for, ask about the hiring process to help them better present their strengths to a prospective employer and to learn what questions they should be asking.
In our role working as a resource partner to many businesses and also closer to home in running our own business, I have come to learn the multiple dimensions of hiring. It definitely takes strategy, focus and knowledge of people.
An aspect that is really important and often over-looked is defining the culture of your firm and the working environment. You are selling a brand to your customer when you sell your company's service or product. That brand also has to be sold to the people you wish to hire. The culture you have internally will be projected through your team to your clients. So ultimately, your working culture internally should be aligned to the company brand being sold through your product. If you are an employer you need to ask whether this is the case. Similarly, if you are seeking to be hired, you should ask this question of your prospective employer.
Now, the next issue to be addressed is what are the required behaviors, skills and knowledge required for the role in your company? Then, does the prospective hire have the right mix of those? Certainly something we see is that not enough emphasis is placed on the behaviors, or what we call the talents. The talents can broadly be defined as the person's innate drivers which continually repeat themselves and are predictable. They are the behaviors fixed or ingrained from early in life and cannot be learned. Skills and knowledge can be learned. There are many classic instances where the hiring process goes wrong because the candidate has the wrong behaviors for the role (nothing to do with character or ethics, although they are themselves an issue). Very often candidates have been hired based on skills and/or knowledge. For instance, let's look at sales and client service people.
A candidate may have had a very good track record in one business but will that translate to success in yours? So often it does not. The brand, culture, environment, infrastructure and general circumstances of your business may be very different. Being a successful relationship manager for a large established private bank could be very different to taking on a financial planning role in a smaller advisory firm, such as an RIA. A key factor will be whether the candidate has to manage existing clients or in fact, go and hunt for new ones, which is completely different. Then there are the differing requirements for implementation, problem solving, working independently, networking etc. Many of the same skills and knowledge may be required but the talents could be very different. Not all CFP's can passionately do the same activities productively over the long-term and without stress. Why? It is about behavior. This is not saying skills and knowledge are not important.
So it is absolutely key to get round pegs in round holes for everyone's sake. This is where we have found gaining objective and measured insight from the use of the Financial DNA Path profiles has really helped employers. Further, we are also profiling for passion and values to get even more insight.
My view is that you can transform the hiring process from being a chore to an educational process for you as the employer and the candidate. As the employer every candidate will teach you something about the role, your business and yourself. Then for the candidate they can learn more about themselves. Look at it that whilst you are doing the best for yourself, you can also be helping people find something they would be great at doing and love to do every day. If you take that approach outwardly in your presentation and internally in your own beliefs you may just have better chances of hiring and retaining top hires.
