The BFSI sector is undergoing rapid growth and transformation. HR’s role is key in supporting this growth and achieving business outcomes by acquiring, grooming, and leveraging the right talent. However, the process of hunting for the right talent has become a daunting task, in the wake of many recruitment transformations. To empower businesses to achieve successful hiring outcomes, especially in the rapidly evolving BFSI sector, this webinar brought exclusive and incredible insights by industry leaders Pratima Pinto Thomas, Head HR, Fino Payments Bank; Ruhie Pande, CHRO, Godrej Capital;  Sujatha Kumaraswamy, CEO, MeritTrac Services and Venkattesh R., President and Head Operations, Technology, HR, and CIO, DCB Bank Ltd. 

Current hiring trends in BFSI

With the Great Resignation and ongoing digital transformation, hiring has become an ongoing priority with the following key shifts: 

• Sourcing: Sourcing has shifted from consultants to social media hiring to more interactive open-market sourcing, according to Pratima. Ruhie Pande, CHRO, Godrej Capital shares “Today there is openness to hire talent from different industries to solve specific challenges”. Sujatha suggests organizations must have a dedicated sourcing strategy basis skillsets, locations, remote-work models, etc. 
• Assessment & Selection: The trend of candidates window-shopping is making companies focus on tools such as psychometric tests, occupational tests, etc. to assess talent comprehensively and accurately. Pratima shares that customers are realizing how this can enable a good fit, faster hiring, and attrition management. Fino HR too understands the needs, desires, and aspirations of their applicants for a win-win fit. Ruhie says, “At Godrej Capital, we focus on why to hire a candidate and also on whether candidates are joining for the right reasons”. HR’s role is to seek information on softer aspects such as real-time experiences and evidence, and validate these. 
• Development: Venkattesh believes that companies need to work on investing in talent for tomorrow, and not just buying talent from yesterday. Balancing buy with build through campus programs and development focus, is the Godrej Capital way.
• Engagement: Human touch enables candidate engagement. At Fino Payments Bank, selected people are invited to the office to interact with team members and thus create a great pre-joining experience, to convince them to take a joining decision. 
• Technology-led hiring: The massive influx of tech in the hiring space has led to platform strengthening through new features, believes Sujatha.

Tech-transformation in recruitment

Organizations are going digital across the recruitment funnel. Fino digitalized the pre-onboarding process, whereas Godrej Capital shifted to ERP-led virtual hiring to attract the millennial population. DCB Bank uses AI and ML to automatically publish jobs across portals; the resume-parsing provides candidates with a ‘pop-up’ of ideal job fits and provides recruiters with an easy thumbs-up-thumbs-down view for selection. “From 0% hiring through own career site, we moved to 25% recruitment through our portals, with reliance on other job sites down by 6-7%. We have also built a candidate pool of 80000+ profiles to tap into for future“, shares Venkattesh. 

According to Sujatha, organizations are expecting a fully digital experience from service providers, complete with a single integrated platform, great UI, an easy-to-deploy system, and insightful analytics. “Also, tech is expected to improve the recruitment strategy throughout the life cycle”, says she. Yet, no amount of tech can replace 1-0-1 interactions and engagement, because the technology works best alongside human intervention. “We connect with candidates during their notice period through an app and help them interact with senior leaders, play quizzes, earn points, etc. Such human element brings real connectivity with the young generation and prevents no-shows.”, shares Venkattesh. Pratima agrees, “At Fino, we deploy tech while focusing on human understanding to connect with individuals”.  

Clearly, digital transformation with personalized human interaction is the way ahead. 

Balancing tech and touch

The human aspects of talent selection extend to training managers in online assessments so that they know how to assess body language and non-verbal cues, believes Ruhie. Recruiters must learn how to harness the power of social media through the intranet, employee referrals, internal job postings, Instagram, Glassdoor, etc. to remain relevant and available. “Candidates today are interested in knowing about their daily work life, hence building stories around work and middle-line managers worked for us”, says Ruhie. 

Venkattesh believes that hiring is all about giving prospective employees a peek into the culture through storytelling around employee experiences. “Our Top Recruit program brings real-life business cases to 200+ business campuses through a YouTube-like knowledge series. Live interactions give fresh talent a peek into life at DCB Bank and give us access to a talent network”, shares Venkattesh. Curating such two-way insights helps create candidate delight.

As companies reimagine their future, they are still building a vision of how to bring down recruitment costs, evaluate costs of candidate hiring vis-à-vis productivity, and reduce cycle time. Here, the design of assessment tools plays a critical role. Sujatha mentions the need to have a combination of areas in the assessment such as domain, functional, cognitive, behavioural, and specific aptitudes such as digital usage and customer focus. Most important is the cultural fit assessment which involves not just competency, but desires, needs, etc. for different roles. Ruhie highlights the need for a very defined talent strategy i.e. HR and business both coming together and defining where they are today and what talent to build for the future. To bridge the skill gap through development, they must deeply assess the critical roles, capabilities and high-potential talent. 

A well-articulated talent proposition showcases career growth, diversity and inclusion, employee empowerment, and open communication, which can help retain talent. Venkatesh shares, “I see there is more focus on What versus How i.e. the pressure of target achievement than how to get the work done.” Improved two-way communication, supervisory capability, and risk-compliance-governance will play a vital role. From a long-term perspective, organizations must think of expanding the pool beyond the obvious, because today’s youngsters like to be asked what they want to do and to be involved in every decision as they manage their careers. This is possible only if leaders change their mindset toward talent. “If we continue to think of ‘employees for life, we have lost the battle already“, closes Venkattesh.