5 Ways to entice Risk and Compliance Professionals to your business in 2020

In this article, I discuss how businesses can attract talented risk and compliance professionals to their financial services or fintech business in 2020. This skill set is in high demand and you need to compete to win talent.

Late last year on LinkedIn, I shared my perspective on the unprecedented demand for talented risk and compliance professionals. This is primarily due to the impact of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, the introduction of the Whistleblower Act and subsequent ASIC and AUSTRAC and APRA investigations. These industry wide initiatives have far reaching impacts and organisations across the board are fine tuning policies, procedures and ensuring that internal processes support governance and compliance.

These high profile investigations have financial services organisations sitting up and taking notice. They are all keen to stay out of the hands of the regulators in 2020 and beyond!

So, with demand high for experienced risk and compliance professions amongst my lending, funds management and superannuation clients and everyone wanting industry specific experience of 3+ years, how do you attract talent to your organisation?

In recent months, in my experience, the larger players are investing money to build their risk and compliance teams.

They are investing in headcount in these divisions and are employing staff (or backfilling BAU positions) to run remediation projects. In some cases the bigger organisations are offering slightly inflated salaries to entice candidates away from boutique or medium sized entities. With market salaries generally flat over the last 5-7 years this may have some impact on turnover.

In talking to candidates, an increase in salary is not necessarily enough to get them over the line. Below I discuss the factors that risk and compliance professionals are considering compelling enough to move.

1.      Company Culture

Consider whether your company culture is attractive to a risk and compliance professional. As a general rule, they are often attracted to a culture that values integrity and looks after their people. They are also likely to highly value an opportunity at an organisation that is innovative and focused on the customer experience.

2.      More Interesting Work

Often, working for a larger organisation can mean being restricted to a specialist area and operating in a silo tucked away from the rest of the organisation. It is often appealing to risk and compliance professionals to work across multiple products and to be given the opportunity to deal with multiple stakeholders at all levels. This is something that sometimes gives a smaller organisation an advantage, as they find this easier to offer. This helps candidates build comprehensive skills, develops valuable experience and adds variety to the work. A candidate may love building processes and implementing policies and procedures. This can be simpler to do in a nimble smaller organisation.

A boutique organisation can sometimes offer the right talented professional the excitement of a role where they can build a risk and compliance function from the ground up. This work is interesting, as they can be involved in design, implementation, and system integrations. They may get experience on-boarding products, training staff and working in a cooperative environment. This work is challenging AND rewarding. They can roll their sleeves up and have a real business impact.

3.      Access to Senior Management

Consider where your most senior decision makers are based. Access to senior management such as the CEO, COO and Chief Risk Officer is a great selling point to a talented candidate. Often in my conversations with risk and compliance professionals, I have found it useful to be able to demonstrate that the company leaders are respected, that they are industry leaders and brand advocates. As a recruiter, I have invested many years in understanding the values of senior industry leaders, what they believe in and their management style. Being able to define the company expectations of a new team member to an applicant gives a great insight into company culture and values.

 4.      Career Progression Opportunities

Consider your last couple of risk and compliance appointments. Have you promoted internally? Do your best people get to work on the most interesting and challenging projects? Being able to demonstrate clear career progression opportunities to a potential new hire can help entice them to change companies.

You may be able to offer a talented risk and compliance professional the ability to work for a corporate underdog. It can be appealing to work for a company that is chipping away at the bigger players who are still dealing with the public relations fall-out from the Banking Royal Commission.

5.      Work Life Balance

Your organisation might be located in an area that manages to reduce a candidate’s current commuting time or offer them an easy commute by public transport rather than being stuck for hours in traffic. You may be able to offer them the opportunity to work from home occasionally. Candidates are increasingly valuing the opportunity to have a life outside of work and to engage more with their family or contribute to the community.

The year 2020 is set to be a year when financial services and fintechs are heavily focused on governance and compliance. Everyone is keen to avoid further PR disasters and to deliver great customer experiences. Attracting talent to your business to help you do this, is just the first step in a long journey.

At Oxygen Recruitment & HR we will be spending 2020 tenaciously searching for and placing talented and professional risk and compliance staff. Talk to us if you are wanting to build the risk and compliance functions in your organisation. You can get in touch with our Sydney based team here www.oxygenrecruitment.com.au