In the last couple of years, hiring managers in the finance and accountancy landscape have been battling fierce competition in the quest to secure top talent. Skill shortages continue to influence the industry, and candidate expectations are evolving.
While many factors can influence the success of your hiring process, one of the most important things you can do to boost your chances of success is to invest in the right interview process.
The right interview strategy accelerates the recruitment journey, ensuring you collect insights from each candidate to make an informed decision. It can improve your employer brand, demonstrating your commitment to candidate expectations. Additionally, it can increase your chances of long-term employee retention.
On the other hand, a poor interview process could increase talent turnover, harm your company’s image, and make it harder to attract the employees you need.
Here’s how to optimise your interview process and improve your hiring strategy.
Step 1: Identifying Essential Skills and Qualifications
Before the interview process begins, it’s important to understand exactly what you’re looking for in a new financial employee. The more you know about your ideal candidate, the easier it is to craft interview questions and strategies that drive positive results.
First, look at your business goals and what you want to accomplish in the years ahead. Determine what technical skills and credentials will be essential for anyone filling your new role. Focus specifically on the skills you need most, such as finance or accounting credentials or experience working with specific tools and technology.
Remember, many of the “nice to have” skills you may prefer your candidates to have can be learned on the job, expanding your potential hiring pool. Remember to look beyond technical skills too, to the soft skills or characteristics of your ideal candidate. You may want someone with strong leadership and communication skills, an excellent level of resiliency, or a commitment to professional development.
Determine how you’ll assess each of the skills and qualifications essential to the role during the interview process, such as by asking competency-based questions or asking employees to complete assessments relevant to the position.
Step 2: Crafting Precise Job Descriptions
Once you know what you’re looking for in a new employee, crafting precise and clear job descriptions is the next step. An effective job description doesn’t just improve your chances of attracting candidates to your team; it can also contribute to a stronger interview process.
Your job description sets expectations for each candidate about the questions they’ll need to answer and the experience or skills they’ll need to demonstrate. This ensures they can prepare effectively for the interview.
In your job descriptions, highlight not just the responsibilities of the role and the financial qualifications your employee will need but also the company culture and your organisation’s visions and goals. This will ensure you attract candidates who fit your workforce well.
To ensure your job descriptions make the right impact, review them with other staff members in your team with similar roles, or consider speaking to a recruitment agency for more assistance. A recruitment agency can give you tips on enhancing the value of your job descriptions.
Step 3: Developing a Structured Interview Framework
The initial assessment you conduct of your company’s needs and the job descriptions you craft will give you the foundations for building an effective structured interview framework. Structured interviews are excellent for ensuring you fairly assess each candidate based on their technical abilities, characteristics, and cultural fit.
With structured interviews, you ask all candidates questions in the same order and use the same assessment criteria to make the right choice for your business. Make sure you:
- Design a list of valuable questions: Craft specific questions for your interview process that will help you evaluate your candidate’s soft and hard skills. Competency-based and behavioural questions like “Tell me about a time when your attention to detail helped you to achieve the right results for your employer” can lead to valuable insights.
- Establish a clear scoring system: Determine how you’ll score each person’s response based on things like the experience they demonstrate, their confidence in answering questions, and how well they seem to fit with your company culture.
- Collaborate with other team members: Get the right people from your team involved in developing the interview framework. Ask supervisors and team leaders for insights into the questions you should ask to evaluate each candidate.
Step 4: Mitigating Unconscious Bias
Minimising the risk of unconscious bias affecting your interview process is important today. 80% of employees say they want to work with diverse, equitable, and inclusive companies. Evidence of bias in your interview process could harm your employer’s brand and drive valuable candidates away from your team.
Moreover, unconscious bias could lead you to make poor hiring decisions, which reduce your chances of retaining employees or leave you with the wrong talent in your team.
The first step in addressing unconscious bias is raising awareness. Train your hiring managers and business leaders to detect evidence of bias in their decision-making process. Make them aware of the factors that could influence their choices, such as “confirmation bias” or “affinity bias”.
Next, look for ways to reduce the risk of biased decisions. For instance, working with an experienced financial recruitment agency to assess candidates could be an excellent strategy. These companies can assist you with implementing “blind recruitment” strategies, which invoice removing certain information from an application that could influence decisions.
The right recruitment team can also assist in pre-vetting potential applicants, ensuring you’re focusing on the skills and attributes crucial to your role.
Step 5: Commit to Constant Improvement
Optimising the interview process is a constant process. Consistently evaluating the success of your current strategy ensures you can detect potential problems that might be harming your ability to select and recruit the right candidates.
Gather insights from your candidates and existing employees, asking them for feedback on parts of the interview process you can improve. Look at the success rate of your hires over time and consider whether you may be making decisions based on the wrong evaluation criteria. At the same time, be aware of changing trends in the recruitment landscape.
Implementing strategies for blind recruitment can be an excellent way to reduce your chances of unconscious bias. Using application tracking systems and AI tools can help you sort through applications more effectively, boosting your chances of a quicker “time to hire”.
Additionally, working with recruitment agencies in the financial space can help you access the expertise and guidance you need to enhance the candidate experience. They can offer tips on improving interview questions and making intelligent hiring choices.
Upgrading your Interview Strategy
Your interview strategy for choosing effective financial candidates ensures your business can thrive and grow. By implementing the strategies above, you can improve the interview process and candidate experience, boosting your chances of hiring the right professionals and also attracting more talent to your team.
Remember, viewing the interview process as a dynamic component of your talent acquisition strategy, which should evolve and adapt over time is important.
If you need extra help with your interview or hiring strategy, contact Rebus Recruitment today for expertise in the finance sector.
Thanks
Rachel
About Rebus Financial Recruitment
Rebus Financial Recruitment provides a specialist and focused recruitment service to its customers, ranging from various organisations, including SMEs, to large PLCs.
We strive to offer both the client and candidate a seamless recruitment experience. Using our expertise, we get to the heart of employer and employee needs, and, in doing so, we match the two perfectly.
To learn more, contact one of our team members today or call us at 01282 930930.
