Using assessment centres to recruit finance staff

How larger corporates are changing their recruitment practices to find and engage the best talent.

Finance staff are always in demand. But good finance staff, with the qualities most prized by employers in larger corporates – technical skill, comfort with technology, well-developed leadership capabilities – are even more sought after, particularly by larger organisations with increasingly complex needs.  

That partly explains why the old methods of finance recruitment are changing. The UK’s top employers are moving from parcelling out vacancies to recruiters, placing ads in trade publications, doing the milk round for grads or relying on word-of-mouth referrals to a more rigorous and professional approach.

If you build it, they might come

Spencer Harrison is head of Learning and Development at convenience retailer EG Group. As with most other businesses, EG relies on the injection of fresh energy that new finance staff provide. However, he acknowledges the recruitment challenge facing the business: EG’s Blackburn HQ location can sometimes be a block on attracting bright young things to join the finance team.

“As philanthropic as it is, us having our head office here, and investing in the locality that the business originates in, and very honorable and very worthwhile, it can be difficult to attract talent to Blackburn,” he says.

“We know that we can’t compete in terms of perception or penetration into the market with organisations like Kaplan and KPMG,” he says. “We recognised that, so we’ve moved to an assessment centre model to put us in the same sort of market.

“We do know if we can get people on our site then the kudos and gravitas of ‘Head Office’ will dispel any concerns that those people have and then when we present the company to them that removes many of those barriers.”

Meeting on location

Once on site, Harrison and his team have prioritised in-person recruitment strategy that focuses on developing rapport and engagement with candidates. And he points out that despite the changes wrought by Covid-era home working, getting candidates into the office early on is critical.

“Running recruitment in-person makes it a little bit more compelling and personalized. Although we’re still meeting digitally and remotely nowadays, what we’re finding is, if we want to retain talent – and financial talent is difficult to retain because it’s a very competitive market – having that social interaction is much more beneficial in the short, medium and long term.”

In common with its peers, EG Group now invites candidates to a session at the assessment centre where they tackle three components. ”We’ve simplified it in many ways,” says Harrison.

“There’s a half an hour introduction to the business, and the key stakeholders within the team and so on. Then the psychometric testing takes an hour. Finally, we move into what is essentially a soft skills assessment in terms of interface with other people, personality skills, problem-solving in a realistic environment, presentation skills, social interaction and so on. And there’ll be group tasks,” he says.

And, rather than throwing people together at random, Harrison says each team is created based on the previous test results. “That’s so we can see how people will respond to each other, or how someone more capable will work with someone that’s perhaps less capable.”

A comprehensive model for a well-rounded cohort

The holistic assessment model is used at many large corporates aiming to attract well-rounded finance staff. One is Network Rail. “There are a few different areas that we focus on,” says Annabel Allen, Apprentice & Graduate Programmes Manager for Group Finance at the body.

“I would say ability to work in a team is a big thing, to demonstrate collaborative skills. Then I would say the passion for the scheme and for the industry. There’s so much that anyone can find about the rail industry and Network Rail before they come to an interview. That’s quite a basic thing that we expect people to have researched because we do have a presence out there.

“Then finally, a natural skill for finance is good but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be a maths genius. It just means that you’ve got that financial flair in the way you think.”

Having adopted the assessment centre model, Allen says the testing regime is constantly honed and improved with one key factor in mind: the needs of the business as a whole. “Our early careers team are already reviewing and building on the exercises for next year’s assessment centres,” she explains.

It’s an area that the recruitment and careers departments tweak based on what the most recent intake may be lacking, or what assessors say the team should consider focusing on.

“All of our assessors are from the finance function, so they’re always really engaged and they come back to us afterwards and critique the exercise, and tell us which parts could be better.”

Bringing recruitment practices in-house

That level of detail explains why more corporates are moving away from using recruiters in favour of developing bespoke in-house teams targeting in the right talent for the business needs.

“I’m not being disrespectful to recruiters, because that’s the nature of that industry and it’s commission driven, and since we’re a commercial business we understand that,” says EG’s Harrison.

“And some are better than others. But we run those figures to see how much we are spending on recruitment, how much we’re doing on advertising, how much are we doing to our own website. When we look at those metrics and see which is successful, it’s a little bit of a spiky profile.

“When making spend more efficient, recruiter systems aren’t necessarily aligned to what we’re looking for. As much as we articulate that to them, there’s always a distortion because their interest is in selling us a product that sometimes doesn’t meet our need. Taking it in-house means we’re in charge of our own needs now.”

Christian Doherty is a business journalist and freelance writer for AAT.