Recruitment Challenges For Digital Finance Transformation

The digital transformation of financial services in India has been a stupendous success story. Thanks to innovations like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), digital finance transformation is delivering a superior user experience that even the United States does not have at the moment.

Clearly, banking and financial services is an area where the impact of digital transformation has been keenly felt. It is no longer an accessory, but a core essential feature that delivers efficiencies and stakeholder experiences on an unprecedented scale.

Digital finance transformation also exerts considerable stress on organisation, particularly in the areas of HR and Recruitment. In this article, we will explore the impact such an endeavour made on your workforce, and how CFOs need to rely on recruitment managers to keep everything in good nick.

What is Digital Finance Transformation?

Since they deal directly with money, financial service is an area that has a heavy burden of due diligence, compliance, and security processes. This directly translates into two things:

• A heavy burden on manpower and financial resources
• A slow and often cumbersome user experience for clients (think in-person visits, slow onboarding, etc.)

With the rise of improved IT and software technologies, we now have the option to automate many of the repetitive manual processes, while simultaneously improving transparency, security, efficiency, and above all, user experiences.

Through the adoption of technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), blockchain, cloud-based data analytics, and AI, organisations can deliver a faster, paperless, fully digital access to essential financial services via mobile and internet banking.

This is the gist of digital finance transformation. In businesses that deliver financial products as their core function, this kind of transformation can lead to fundamental, drastic changes inside the organisational setup.

Impact of Digital Finance Transformation on Recruitment

Many companies make the fatal mistake of looking at digital transformation as a problem of technology. The real problem lies elsewhere – in preparing your employees to adapt to the disruptive new technologies and digital tools.

For any proper meaningful advancement in digital transformation, an organisation needs employees with digital talent. You need employees with relevant KSAs (Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities) in IT and Finance related fields.

But acquiring this is easier said than done, given the worsening crisis of digital talent gap across the world, with over 59 per cent of employers reporting a moderate impact on their business due to shortage of skilled employees.

According to Gartner, the following skills are must-haves for organisations embarking on a digital finance transformation journey:

• AI Automation – the ability to identify ways to unlock new value through the implementation of AI chatbots and other RPA/machine learning technologies in finance
• Business Process Management – with everything these days hosted on the cloud, business managers need competency in areas like vendor management and service-level-agreements, which were delegated to IT departments in the past
• Data Analytics – big data is the new gold, but to unlock that value, you need employees with expertise in converting data analytics insights into real-world applications
• Collaboration – instead of devoting their attention to pure number crunching, finance personnel should also be capable of close collaborations with other departments

The implications are clear and unambiguous – CFOs cannot move ahead with digital transformation on their own. In fact, they have to rely heavily on HR managers and recruiters to fill the talent gap for these roles.

But they face an uphill task, particularly in India – according to the 2022 Nasscom-Zinnov Report, there will be a shortage of 14 to 19 lakh tech professionals with adequate skills and certifications.

4 Ways in which Recruitment can Assist CFOs in Digital Finance Transformation

In the present scenario, HR managers and recruitment teams will have to think out of the box to keep their companies digital transformation efforts on track. The following are some potential solutions:

Short-Term Contracts

While many positions required for digital transformation are long-term roles in an organisation, there are also quite a few that only require short-term contracts. This could include specialist IT roles like software developers and app designers. These days, many major businesses are increasingly turning to tech freelancers to overcome skill gaps. 

Upskilling

Since it often takes considerable time to teach existing employees new skills, particularly in complex fields like AI and Data Analytics, upskilling cannot be a short-term solution. But it should absolutely be a part of your long-term HR planning, given that the ongoing talent shortage has no end in sight. Recruiters can also advertise it as a route to career progression to attract young talent.

Agile Recruitment Teams

Digital Transformation in finance is still a relatively young field. New roles and job openings with unique skill combinations are being created all the time. Traditional recruitment channels are often incapable of zeroing in on the right talent, especially those in senior roles. Using the agile methodology in recruitment, you can create teams that have higher success rates of finding top class talent.

Skill-Based Hiring

Certifications play a big role in influencing hiring decisions, particularly in the digital sector. But due to the current crisis, a slight loosening of these guidelines may be necessary. Instead of focusing on certifications, recruiters must pay more attention to the actual digital skills, knowledge, and ability of a candidate and assess the impact they can have on digital finance transformation. 

Recruitment Holds the Key to Success in Digital Transformation

According to a study in the German Journal of Human Resource Management, three things are necessary to successfully attract and retain talent for digital transformation in finance:

• Recruiters need to adapt new tactics and processes
• Changes should be made to the mindset behind recruitment
• The organisation needs to position itself properly to attract talent

While two of these are fully under the control of HR and Recruitment departments, the final one requires the active participation of senior leaders of the entire business organisation.

CFOs and C-suite must realise the importance of aspects like workplace culture, employer branding, and general reputation of the firm from a recruitment perspective. If you can achieve that, recruiting for digital finance transformation will become much easier.