How technology delivers smoother financial services recruitment and onboarding

More effective financial services recruitment, onboarding, and training could help solve the sector’s ongoing labour challenges. Technology has a key role to play.

Recent years have seen record vacancy levels, notwithstanding a recent drop, according to the Financial Services Skills Commission’s (FSSC) report.

The scarcity has come about in part due to the sector’s rapid digitisation. Such digitisation is leading to increased demand for the 13 ‘future skills’ identified by the FSSC. These skills include data analysis and insight, digital literacy, and software development.

The situation now means that one in eight financial services jobs is a technology role. This is twice the proportion of the wider economy. Put another way, demand for technical skills continues to outstrip supply by 20%.

The upshot, recent research reveals, is that three quarters of employees now believe this lack of expertise is holding both them and their organisation back. As a result, employers are increasingly focusing on upskilling and reskilling to tackle the problem. But financial services recruitment also remains a vital means of boosting in-house skills.

Technology has a vital role to play at all points of the employee lifecycle. The right tools enhance financial services recruitment, onboarding, and learning and development, in turn boosting employee experience.

Technology for financial services recruitment, onboarding, and development

1. Applicant tracking systems

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) manage the recruitment process from end to end. They organise and store job-seeker-related information to make it searchable, and track candidates’ progress throughout the recruitment process.

Key benefits

• Using ATS technology lets you create a potential pool of qualified new talent that can be approached when needed. This can help cut costs and time-to-hire.
• Providing a positive candidate experience is vital in a competitive market to keep applicants engaged and interested.
• Integrating your ATS with the HR system ensures a seamless data flow, automating the process and reducing the likelihood of human error.

2. Onboarding software

Onboarding software automates, standardises, and streamlines the process of welcoming new employees into the workplace.

The aim is to ensure their transition is a smooth one. Such applications usually include a portal that recruitment teams can use to undertake essential tasks. These include communicating with new hires and handling important activities, from a financial services background check to payroll and benefits administration.

As such portals are self-service and mobile-friendly, employees can also use them to get on top of their pay, benefits and overall work situation even before they start.

Key benefits

• Research indicates that an effective onboarding process boosts the retention of new starters by 82% and productivity by more than 70%.
• New hires can begin to feel part of the team before even starting work by gaining access to central resources. These include company policies, first-day instructions, and training materials. They can also complete admin and book meetings with new colleagues in advance.
• An integrated background checking service as part of the onboarding process speeds up time-to-hire, optimises costs, reduces the admin burden, and manages risk.

3. Learning management software

Learning management software enables you to develop, deploy, update, and track a wide range of training materials tailored to your organisational needs. With effective learning and development, financial services firms can addresses skills gaps, foster continuous professional development, and gain a competitive edge.

Key benefits

• This kind of software can help boost employee engagement and retention, cut training costs, and make learning content easily accessible to all.
• Being able to centrally administer enterprise-wide reskilling programmes is important to ensure consistency and ensure they align with organisational goals.
• Having the capabilities to develop personalised training schemes is essential to optimise individual learning and development.

Enhance talent management with Zellis

Our award-winning HR software includes a powerful talent management system, featuring dedicated tools for a consistent and engaging employee lifecycle – from hire to retire.

We provide a seamless integration between our HR software and our partner recruitment solution, Talentsoft. This simplifies recruitment with automation and allows easy generation of reports on every aspect of talent acquisition.

Strong onboarding improves new hire retention by 82%, and productivity by over 70%. Our customisable portal speeds up the onboarding process by 10%, on average. We have also partnered with cloud-based learning and talent management vendor, Cornerstone. The connector links our HCM Cloud system with its TalentLink ATS, creating a more streamlined experience for candidates. Other benefits include intelligent monitoring capabilities to highlight any data quality or validation issues and the automatic creation of support tickets.

Our talent management software provides a single, centralised platform which helps you identify learning and development needs, as well as monitor individual training and compliance.

HR professionals can also use our Intelligence Platform to obtain a single, holistic view of the organisation’s entire workforce data. This includes not only the information generated by our system but also the third-party applications we support, which includes Cornerstone. As a result, HR teams can identify and analyse workforce trends across the whole employee lifecycle, enabling them to undertake evidence-based decision making and optimise talent management at all levels.

Learn more about our work with the financial services industry.