High performers in the banking and credit union sectors often exhibit traits such as strong analytical skills, exceptional customer service, adaptability, initiative, and a continuous desire for learning and improvement. They also possess the ability to work effectively both as individuals and within teams.
During the hiring process, potential high performers can be identified by looking for candidates who demonstrate a proactive approach to problem-solving, clear communication skills, a track record of achievements, and the willingness to learn and take on challenges. Behavioral interview questions are particularly useful in uncovering these qualities.
Banks and credit unions can attract high performers by offering competitive salaries, opportunities for career advancement, continuous professional development programs, and a positive organizational culture that values innovation and excellence.
Organizational culture plays a crucial role in retaining high performers. A culture that fosters collaboration, recognition, and personal growth will not only keep top talents motivated but also committed to the institution's long-term goals.
Nurturing a winning culture involves creating an environment where feedback is encouraged and valued, success is celebrated, failure is seen as a learning opportunity, and employees feel empowered to take initiative and innovate. Regular team-building activities and open communication channels can also contribute to a positive culture.
Common mistakes include overemphasizing technical skills while undervaluing soft skills, not considering cultural fit, and relying solely on past performance without assessing potential for growth and adaptability.
High performers can significantly influence team dynamics by setting high standards, inspiring others through their work ethic, and fostering a collaborative environment. However, it's essential to balance individual achievements with team goals to maintain harmony and prevent competition from overshadowing collaboration.
Leadership plays a pivotal role in developing high performers by providing direction, mentorship, and opportunities for growth. Effective leaders challenge their teams, recognize and reward excellence, and create an environment where high performers can thrive.
Technologies such as performance management software, employee engagement platforms, and data analytics tools can help identify high performers by tracking achievements, gathering feedback, and analyzing patterns that indicate high performance.
Small banks can compete by offering a more personalized work environment, greater flexibility, a stronger sense of community, and more direct involvement in decision-making processes. Focusing on these aspects can appeal to high performers who value a close-knit culture and the opportunity to make a significant impact.
Mitch: Welcome back to another episode of Lending Made Easy. Today we're going to dive deep into the world of talent acquisition within the banking industry. And as financial institutions try to stay competitive and innovative, attracting top talent becomes really a critical mission. Reality is that banks just aren't competing with other local banks for top talent we're competing across the country with almost every other industry as well, especially when it comes to those high achievers and the top talent that we're looking for. So today I'm joined again by, by Bryan Peckinpaugh and David Catalano. David, Brian, you've both run teams in the past. You've both hired top talent.
So to kick things off, I guess I'd, I'd like to ask the big question when you're hiring, how do you recognize top talent? And then how does that also translate to someone that's in the banking industry today? So I'll toss that up for either one of you, whoever wants to take that one first.
Bryan: First and foremost, I think what you really have to do is clearly define what good looks like to you. What you expect out of that role, because far too often it is a very loose definition and we're kind of going on gut on this person seems like they would be a good fit or appears like they have done this job well in the past and that all may be true, but they may not fit what you want out of that role in your desire.
I'll use our world for a minute of selling financial services technology. And very broadly, there's two schools of thought in selling something like a commercial loan origination system. Do I go get people with deep background and experience in this area? So do I go get somebody who was a commercial lender, as an example, and try to teach them how to sell technology?
Or do I go and get somebody who has a background in selling technology? And try to teach them about commercial lending, commercial banking, and then all the flavors in between. And you, you've got to define for yourself, what do you want in the role? What do you feel is going to be the easiest to teach them.
In an ideal world we get perfect candidates every time. Almost never happens. You're going to have to build up certain aspects of their skills. So the more you can define what the characteristics are of a successful person in the role you're trying to fill, the more you can be more analytical about that hiring instead of just gut decisions, what are those metrics?
How do you kind of get them to show and prove what they're able to do against those metrics?
David: Those are really good points, Bryan. The trick is to make sure that they're culturally compatible and they're capable of doing the work. And I think it's far easier to find people capable of doing the work, especially if you're a banker and you're doing credit analysis. And there's lots of people that can do analysis like that, but are they culturally compatible?
And I think as a hiring manager, it's important to be brutally honest. Around culture and understanding what expectations are and what norms are within the organization to make sure that this person, whoever you're interviewing feels really good about the things that you're saying, because if they don't and they're not culturally compatible, we'll just leave.
So I think it's easier to find. the skill set than it is the cultural compatibility. And then second, I think the skills and the abilities and the performance of a person start really early in life, right? So you can go back to eighth grade, figure out what they've been doing. You can go back to high school, you can go to college, you can ask them questions about their previous experiences in history.
And I think that you don't just wake up when you're 30 and decide to become a high performer. That started a long time ago. So the question is, what evidence can you uncover during that interview process to determine? Are you dealing with a high performance person? Are you dealing with someone who wants to improve on a continuous basis and has demonstrated that they can do that?
And it's not just getting a high GPA, but high GPA plus what else did they do? So I just think that there's just a series of historical precedents in people's lives that tell you this is a high performer. Now. I got a high performer are they culturally compatible? Are they going to fit into the organization? Are they going to be okay with our level of whatever culturally is appropriate within your organization? So think about, the level of micromanagement. There are some organizations that are incredibly top down driven and there are others that are very loose and a person that can function in one may not be able to function in another. And those are just simple, superficial examples of culture.
Bryan: I want to dive in a little more on two of those aspects, David, the culture and the high performance aspects of it. You're right. The cultural fit is critically important. However, sometimes you also want to bring people in who can be change agents in your culture. If you're trying to drive in a new direction, again, use our, our world of FinTech sales.
Where, you know, sometimes it can be good to bring somebody in who is a high performer who has that track record of success, who does things maybe differently than the team you have in place, if the way they do things is aligned with what you think good looks like to shake up something that might be stale.
So there might be some culture disruption there at first, but again, if part of bringing this person on is to change the culture is to push in a different direction is I have defined what good looks like. Some of my team, or maybe even all of my team are falling short on certain aspects, and I want to bring somebody in who can lead from the front and bring everybody up a level should consider that as well, that it's not necessarily the fit to current culture, but fit for where you want the culture to go and be and continue to thrive.
And then with the high performance aspect of it, I think you're, you're right, David, you have to dig in on getting them to prove that they are high performers. And then it's up to you in alignment with what good looks like to determine if that high performance will translate.
And I'll use an example within Baker Hill here. One of our somewhat newer employees has a background in opera singing, was a high performer in a space that has nothing to do with what we do at Baker Hill. But the hiring manager was able to identify aspects of what made that person a high performer in her prior life and how that then translated to what good looked like for the role that we were trying to hire for, where we needed somebody who was good in front of people who had almost a performance aspect to them and somebody who was used to handling and dealing with rejection that comes from being out in the performance world. You don't always get the roles that you want or the shows that you want. You know, there's a lot of aspects that directly translate and the hiring manager knew that those are kind of intangibles. Those are things I can't necessarily teach you. I can teach you about our solutions. I can teach you about commercial lending. I can teach certain aspects, but if you're not a dynamic personality, if you're not used to being quote unquote on in front of people, that's a hard one to teach, right? There are some aspects that are inherent skill.
So let's translate this into kind of the banking space, maybe a little bit where. We are in an somewhat unprecedented race for talent because the world has expanded, you know, it used to be that it was very locally driven. So from a financial institution perspective, I was competing with the other financial institutions within a certain drivable radius. And the talent pool was bigger. In most cases than my hiring needs, you know, I remember 10, 15 years ago, working with financial institutions is specifically around the world of spreading where, you know, they might be changing vendors or they might be changing, you know, formats of how they think about categorization of data so they're going to respread historical information. And we used to talk about doing conversions and we always squashed it and said, just go hire temps. You can go out and get a handful of people with experience in spreading deals and bring them in for fairly cheap for a short duration. And you're off and running. Well, that doesn't exist anymore. I can't find any to hire full time.
And it's because we're, we're competing. nationally with the work from home that really stemmed out of the, you know, really well took off out of the pandemic, but has been underway for a while. And then the new entrance into the space, like FinTech providers, we're, we're hiring people. We've got a number of folks on staff at Baker Hill that came out of the underwriting space in banks and credit unions, because we need and want that expertise as well as. The other technology companies that are starting to act more like financial institutions, as we've talked about on this podcast, it might be Amazon and the different financial services, verticals and solutions that they're bringing to bear Apple and what they're doing with Apple card and payments and different things. So the level of competition has gone beyond just the banks on the other corners of my block to a true national and sometimes international race for those same high performers. So I've got to start thinking outside of the box. Now, it may not be that you can bring in an opera singer and immediately have them be a high performer as a credit analyst.
But I probably can go get folks with a strong math background, science background, folks with aptitude for numbers, critical thinking, analytics skills, and teach them to apply those to the world of credit risk and lending and find somebody who was a high performer in a completely different area and bring them in a new direction to be the next top talent at the organization.
David: The best pool of top talent I've found is division one athletics. So at Baker Hill, I hired two division one athletes and my colleague hired one division one athlete and all three are on the hunter or basically new client team so they go out and find new institutions to become our clients. Amazing.
Just truly amazing performance out of these folks. To get to the division one athletic level. It doesn't matter what sport, one was baseball, one was football, and one was golf. So it doesn't matter what sport, but imagine how long and how many hours now focused and dedicated you have to be to perform at that level.
So there's just tons of evidence right there that this is a high performance person. And one of them was a young executive that got burned out and he had a huge organization underneath him. He was local here in Carmel. I hired him. And he was incredible. I couldn't keep him. Sometimes you just, you can find these people and they're in the right spot for your position or your company.
But, you know, there may not be enough path for them. And in our situation, there wasn't. And he ended up leaving and going back to running a large organization. We just didn't have that position for them. But, you know, looking for evidence of performance in their background. And sometimes it's not always going to be as obvious as division one athletics, but if you get a division one athlete that wants to come work for you, I would hire them.
Bryan: It shows required discipline, you know, you, you got to go through the minutia, you got to go through the suck, if you will, and be able to come out on the other end. And those always are directly applicable to any, any role that you're hiring for. And that applies not just in, in that world of athletics, David, right? Like, like I mentioned with the opera singer, you know, anybody who. Had that high performance gene you can find it in a lot of things, not just in their work experience. But again, I just, I always come back to the hard work is defining what good looks like, and then, you know, what you're going to manage against.
What type of talent you want to go for what are the more important variables because then I bring the right initial pool. I know what to ask to understand if you're good in the things I need you to be good in. Do you have aptitude in the things I might need to bring you up levels in? And I can also use that as part of ongoing performance management to look at my team is the very few of us get to build teams from scratch. We oftentimes are inheriting teams and part of the overall world of performance management is how do I bring, you know, C's to B's B's to A's and identify the D's and F's and help them find better ways to manage their career so that you're constantly upskilling. But again, if you don't know what those skills are, it's hard to do that across the board.
Mitch: I think this is a great conversation, right? And it's so applicable for where we're at today. And so Bryan, David, thank you guys for sharing. I think some great takeaways around thinking a little bit differently about how we identify top talent. I really like some of these ideas about these people that come from different backgrounds and how they can really bring a lot of value to an organization.
So thank you guys for sharing and thanks everyone out there for listening to today's episode of Lending Made Easy