Wall Street and Main Street may not have the immediate tech appeal of Silicon Valley, but industries like financial services and manufacturing need elite technical talent just as much as — maybe even more than — tech startups. Finding that talent, attracting them to your organization and retaining them for the long term is one of the biggest challenges facing financial services CIOs right now, says Shelton Shugar, CIO of Barclaycard.
The same can be said for other verticals beyond the Bay Area.“Our biggest challenge is competing for the same pool of talent that so many other companies are looking for. When we’re looking for highly talented developers and engineers, we’re often competing with a lot of other major companies for that same talent. It’s sometimes difficult to find and retain the type of talent that has the right skill sets for our business,” Shugar says.
Barclaycard’s headquarters in Wilmington, Del., is about as geographically far from Silicon Valley as you can get, but by taking a page from Silicon Valley’s recruiting and retention playbook, Shugar and the executive and HR teams have been enormously successful in attracting and hiring elite tech talent, some from as far away as Seattle and even the Valley itself, Shugar says.
Much of that starts with awareness and branding; first by emphasizing the benefits of living and working outside Silicon Valley, and also by elevating Barclaycard’s brand as an employer of choice, focusing on culture, mission and purpose and leveraging unconventional screening practices like blind coding challenges.
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“We do a lot to inform potential recruits about working and living in Wilmington and its suburbs.
In fact, a train ride from Philadelphia to Wilmington is less than 30 minutes, so potential employees could easily commute from Philadelphia. We’re also ideally located less than two hours from some of the East Coast’s largest cities — New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C.,” Shugar says, which opens up the potential talent pool. An emphasis on the opportunity to work on meaningful projects that have a global reach is also important, says Shugar, as well as Barclaycard’s partnership with OpenBracket, a local not-for-profit that works to improve the perception of Wilmington as an excellent place for technical talent to live and work.“We’re focusing on branding Barclaycard as a key employer for top technology recruits. We’re working on getting the message out that we’re not just a traditional financial company; we have exciting work going on here. We’re out there looking for talent in different ways — we’re going to local and national meet-ups, getting involved in external recruiting activities, and exploring non-traditional networking tools. Traditional tactics like internet postings haven’t worked for us; so, we’ve modified our recruitment and internet approaches, and applied a more interactive approach to interviewing. Onsite job fairs have proven to be successful, and we’ve also used Hacker Rank to help identify potential candidates that best meet our business needs,” Shugar says.
That strategy also has been successful for Matt Morgan, head of people at home buying technology company Blend, who has increased headcount by roughly 40 percent since starting at Blend in September 2016. Morgan’s approach to hiring focuses on emphasizing the company’s mission and purpose and candidates’ ability to make a major positive impact on the lives of end-users and customers, and that focus has helped in attracting talent from industry titans like Facebook and Box, as well as top institutions like Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, Morgan says.
“What tech companies offer, first and foremost, is the ‘we can change the world’ mentality, which people are really looking for. And we have a really exciting purpose to our business if you think about it — we’re making people more productive, financially secure and successful, as well as making consumer finance more transparent, so that brings people in the door, and of course we have a lot once they’re here to keep them happy and engaged,” Morgan says
Culture is important
That’s extremely important for today’s tech professionals at all seniority levels, according to new research from Kronos and FutureWorkplace. While salary and benefits still matter, the results reinforce the notion that CIOs need to take a page from Silicon Valley’s playbook and focus on culture, mission, purpose and values.
According to “The Financial Industry” survey, which polled 806 U.S. financial services employees at all seniority levels conducted between March 27 and April 4, 2017, flexibility, philanthropy, meaningful work, transparency and innovation emerge as the defining issues that matter most to this multi-generational workforce.
“One in every four…
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