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Exchange Street - In The News

It is often true that in the rush to highlight past performance, key performance indicators and experience, an important aspect of securing the right role is sometimes forgotten. Candidates failing to consistently display the right attitude during the recruitment process put themselves at a huge disadvantage, rendering any other positives aspects relatively unimportant.

Companies are increasingly taking a chance based on a candidate’s attitude rather than simply lining up an individual whose background correlates most closely with a job description.

This is of course great news for many candidates. Smaller organisations finding it difficult to compete financially in the saturated IFA market are often more open to the idea of developing an individual with the talent, hunger and motivation to succeed.

Where both parties take a leap of faith they have to make it work. This ensures extra support and flexibility is provided going forward.

This also has a particular resonance given the amount of consultants moving between the IFA and banking arenas. While the crossover is still plagued by prejudices on both sides, some IFAs, tired of a lack of administrative support and client banks being “not as sold”, are seeing consultancy roles with banks as a way to counter their main problems.

Any candidate wishing to make a move needs to demonstrate from the outset the attitude which recognises potential concerns sales managers will have, while at the same time pro-actively countering them.

Similarly top-quality banking advisers wishing to move to the IFA market need to demonstrate that they too have barriers to break down, but these are not insurmountable. Recognising any shortcomings, while at the same time turning these into a display of your positive approach to work, is a great way to impress a company from the outset.

This is where working with the right recruitment consultant can help candidates. Demonstrating a good attitude does not just start at the interview stage; it begins with that first contact with your consultant. It is not always about facts and figures; many times consultants have an old fashioned “gut feeling” about someone. The client displays an eagerness, a focus, a quiet determination to succeed. Of course, this has to be backed up by experience and qualifications, but just because rival candidates are better qualified or more experienced, does not always put them ahead in the queue.

A candidate demonstrating the attitude that all employers want to see will have the opportunity to put him/herself in the frame for roles which, based solely on experience/qualifications, he/she would probably not be first choice for.

Perhaps this is just a way of trying to get all advisers to be consistently nice to recruiters? Well yes and no. That would be great, but then we would all prefer to work on behalf of driven, articulate and realistic individuals rather than ones who are nice to speak to but do not convince that they are the hungry, new-business orientated consultants that sales managers’ dreams are made of.

This is all plain common sense, but candidates looking for a new role need to continually demonstrate the attitude they would want to see if they were recruiting. Then despite knock backs and frustration at recruitment within financial services being time-consuming, they will eventually succeed.

It is also a reminder that irrespective of what candidates have achieved within financial services a bad attitude gets noticed and can have them crossed off the list before they even start. Now that would not be you would it?

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