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Recruiting talent
As you search for your next great finance hire, it helps to know the state of the most in-demand candidates.
- Where are candidates located?
- Where should you open your next office?
- Which of your competitors are vying for the same talent?
- What’s the size of the candidate pool you’re recruiting from?
Here are some key insights into the finance hiring market to give you a head start.
Searching for talent
Accelerate your time to hire with tactics to help you quickly navigate through online networks and identify qualified candidates. From writing compelling job descriptions to using easy-to-learn search operators, these tips can go a long way to help you find your next finance hire.
Today, most candidates use online job boards, including LinkedIn, to research and apply for their next role. As a recruiter, your focus is on attracting qualified candidates to grow your team, and sharing compelling and informative job posts is a vital part of that. But writing job posts takes time – time which could be better spent connecting with candidates and moving them along in the hiring process. To put hours back into your day, here are five useful job description templates to help you attract great talent for your financial institution.
For more insights, be sure to check out our full section of job templates
For any organization, accountants are part of a financial backbone, enabling operations, furnishing strategies, ensuring compliance, empowering leaders, and more. Accountants fall into a number of categories, including Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), auditors, tax accountants, and investment accountants. In a CPA or other accounting firm, these skilled professionals form part of the firm’s revenue center. In other organizations, accountants provide the skills needed for business leaders to understand their financial resources—and preserve, allocate, and grow them accordingly.
Responsibilities
- Gather all necessary reports and detailed support both periodically and on-demand, including balance sheets, profit and loss statements, revenue forecasts, budgets, and cash-flow statements
- Ensure the integrity of accounting information and reconcile any financial discrepancies by performing or directing forensic research of accounting issues for compliance, and establish quality over transactions and reporting
- Handle AP, verifying payment documentation, referencing outstanding bills, updating debt balance, and conducting disbursement
- Review and reconcile the general ledger, identifying and thoroughly investigating any discrepancies and taking the proper corrective actions to resolve them
- Conduct month-end, quarter-end, and year-end close processes to verify all entries have been created and posted, ensuring completeness, accuracy, and cohesiveness of information
- Manage administrative staff within department and transfer accounting/reporting knowledge to other departments
Skills and Qualifications
- Master’s degree in accounting, business accounting, or finance
- 5+ years corporate accounting experience
- Personal integrity; ability to keep customer and company confidences
- Thorough knowledge of accounting and corporate finance principles and procedures
- Experience in audit and international accounting
If you’re looking to engage with well-qualified financial services talent, LinkedIn is great place to start. There are millions of active and passive candidates who use LinkedIn every day. The trick is knowing how to efficiently search for talent that fits your needs. Luckily, best search practices are easy to learn.
In the search bar on LinkedIn, type in the title of the role you’re hiring for. You’ll likely see several pages of results. But many candidates won’t have the right experience or skill set, or they may be in entirely unrelated roles. That’s why Boolean strings are so useful.
Boolean search allows you to combine keywords with operators (like AND, NOT, and OR) to produce search results that are more relevant to your needs. By creating a Boolean string, you can filter search results based on specific skills, job title, education, or other qualities that relate to your ideal candidate.
LinkedIn’s Boolean search operators are unique from what you’ll find on other sites, so it’s vital to understand the proper search function to get the results you want.
- Use straight quotation marks (") around a word or phrase that must be included – curly quotation marks (“) won’t work
- Add the word “NOT” before a search term that you don’t want to see in your results
- Use the word “OR” between search terms to find candidates who match at least some of your requirements
- Use the word “AND” to find a candidate who matches all of your search terms
Here are a couple of rules regarding the practices outlined above:
- Always type “NOT,” “OR,” and “AND” in capital letters, or they won’t work
- Using the “+” and “-” operators and wildcard “*” searches also won’t work on LinkedIn
You can think of Boolean searches like math, meaning that for each string, LinkedIn Recruiter reads certain parts first. So, as with a math problem, how you assemble your string matters – and if you randomly word your string, the search results will be subpar. To avoid this, it’s crucial to understand how LinkedIn prioritizes search operators and lay your searches out accordingly. The order of precedence is:
- Quotes
- Parentheses
- NOT
- AND
- OR
Placing parentheses around certain search terms allows you to clearly communicate your intentions to LinkedIn’s search engine (so you should try and use them as much as possible). Let’s look at some examples of how search strings can help you find talent for the most in-demand role.
By phrasing your search string as clearly as possible and adding the important details, you can make your searches more targeted and accurate – helping you find the talent you need as quickly as possible. Keep in mind you can home in on relevant candidates even further with additional candidate criteria. Just click “All Filters” near the top after running your search to narrow down candidates by location, industry, school, and more.
Engaging with talent
What does it take to genuinely connect with candidates? Whether you’re messaging them directly, posting your job online, or drawing their eyes with an inside look at your company culture, learning how to differentiate your online brand can give you a real competitive hiring advantage.
Many candidates love hearing about new opportunities, especially if your offer is promising. But great financial services candidates can receive lots of messages from recruiters, both on LinkedIn and via email. That means it’s important for your message to stand out.
General best practices when writing candidate emails:
- Make your subject lines short and impactful
- All-star subject lines use keywords like “thanks,” “exclusive invitation,” “connect,” “job opportunity,” and “join us.”
- Don’t just draft a message – design a conversation starter
- You won’t get far with candidates if your message is weak. Nix the “look at the job and tell me if you’re interested” messages – instead, start a dialogue about their career goals and encourage candidates to explore the opportunity.
- Keep your tone authentic and conversational
- Opt for words that reflect your voice and express a genuine, enthusiastic interest in helping candidates accomplish their professional goals.
When you send messages on LinkedIn via InMail, keep in mind that the key is to establish a personal connection with candidates and spark their interest in the role. This doesn’t mean you can’t use a template, just that your template should be customized to match each candidate’s unique interests, as well as your own writing style. Here are a few examples of InMail messages that establish an immediate connection.
Hi [NAME],
I saw that you’re a graduate of [COLLEGE], which has one of the best undergraduate finance programs in the country. I thought you might be interested in a role we’re currently looking to fill. Your experience working as a financial advisor and building ROI models would be perfect for this role, and I’m really impressed by your latest accomplishments at [COMPANY X]. They show exactly the kind of passion and insight we’re looking for.
You’d be joining a dedicated team with a deep enthusiasm for understanding financial performance, and I think you’d make an incredible addition to the team. I’d love to speak with you about the role and hear more about what you could bring to [ORGANIZATION]. In the meantime, I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.
Best,
[YOUR NAME]
Hi [NAME],
You want a role that gives you responsibility. That’s what we offer at [COMPANY]. We’re dedicated to finding solutions to the financial challenges of tomorrow, which is why we hire candidates who are natural leaders – and that’s what I see in you. We’re also big believers in supporting our staff, which is why we offer comprehensive benefits, competitive salaries, and a lively, dog-friendly office culture.
Would you be interested in setting up a time to talk about your career goals? I’d love to learn more about what you’re looking for in an ideal role, and give you some more information about what we can offer you.
Cheers,
[YOUR NAME]
Hi [NAME],
You want a role where you can make a tangible impact. That’s what we can offer. We’re looking for financial analysts with experience, know-how, and a knack for leadership, and given your resume, you’re a perfect fit. You’ll need to work well in a strategic environment and be capable of designing financial models that can accurately predict performance.
Think you’ve got what it takes? We’d love to have you come aboard. Let’s set up a time to talk – I hope to hear from you soon!
Best,
[YOUR NAME]
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