Hiring people tends to be something of an afterthought for most companies. This is probably because it’s not much of an immediate value add – onboarding someone just feels like a step towards a particular goal, even if that goal isn’t possible without doing the requisite hiring.
And yet finding people can be a very tough thing to do. In my short career thus far, I would say the struggle to onboard good employees has consistently been among the biggest problems companies have faced. At my former employer, for example, hiring software engineers often seemed more difficult than the actual problems those engineers would end up working on.
On a more ‘meta’ level, if you see who people are hiring, you also get a sense of what direction their business is going in and what they’re trying to achieve. Browsing through a competitor’s careers page is a fairly simple way of trying to understand what they’re up to.
With all of this in mind, I spoke last week to Reece Pawsey. Reece is one of the founders of FinTop Consulting, which many readers will be familiar with as a major recruitment company for the retail trading sector.
Can you talk about how FinTop got started?
I set up the company with Kishore [Panjwani], who I used to work with at a company called Experis. To be honest, we fell into the FX/CFD market by chance. When we were at Experis, we got hired by a major broker to build out their sales team. And because of that we realised that there was this wider industry that we could work with and that’s what we ended up doing. So we left Experis and set up FinTop Consulting in 2017 to focus on the retail and institutional FX/CFD market, and we’ve been doing that since.
So you got hired by the broker and then realised that there was this whole market that you could work in?
Sort of, at Experis I had to go out and find my own clients to deal with. Like I said, it was really chance, because I saw the broker was sponsoring an event. Then I looked into them and they happened to be trying to build out a sales team in London. Because they wanted people from the same sector, I ended up coming into contact with all the other companies in the industry, and things just moved from there.
Have you seen any big changes in terms of what people are looking for when hiring? As an example, maybe more sales people were hired five years ago and today brokers look for more on the tech side?
I would say the example you gave is actually one of the main changes. When we started out, the UK retail side of the business was much larger, so there were lots of sales jobs going. That has changed a lot, mainly because the smaller brokers don’t have the same number of sales people as they used to.
Just as an example, we helped build out London Capital Group’s sales team early on. At that point they were a publicly traded company and had a really big sales team. Now they’ve rebranded and their London office is a lot smaller. That’s not a negative for them by the way, it’s just the way the industry has changed. A lot of brokers, at least on the retail side, don’t see the value of having a large sales team in London anymore. Cyprus is much better in that regard because there’s a wider talent pool and it’s also cheaper to hire people.
Another thing is that a lot of brokers are moving towards being more automated. So a bit like the Plus500 model. You can see it on a lot of hiring pages, where before they had a lot of sales roles, now it will be marketing jobs instead.
How has Covid changed things? Clearly market volatility was good for business in a lot of cases, has that meant companies are using higher revenue to hire more people and expand? Also, have the sorts of demands prospective hires make changed – for instance, are more people saying they won’t work somewhere if they can’t work from home?
Maybe a couple of companies have used the money they earned to expand but to be honest I would say, in general, the money they were making just got put back into marketing.
On the hiring side, candidates really vary, in terms of what they want, depending on the location and also the job type. So if you’re in London and you are trying to hire a front-end developer, and you want them to come to the office five days a week, it’s not going to happen, you can push for maybe two days. Same sort of thing with marketing people and some other departments. They aren’t going to come to the office five days a week. If you’re in sales it’s a bit different as you’ll probably have to. But we find most sales people want to do that anyway because they like the atmosphere and being there with other people.
In Cyprus it’s a different story. So people won’t commute between cities, from Limassol to Nicosia for example. Some will but generally they won’t. But if they’re in the same city then they’re happy to go to the office. You have to think, it’s not like the UK where you might be travelling on a packed train or the tube for more than an hour, which is also really expensive. You are driving 20 minutes to the office in your own car. But people in general don’t seem that keen to work from home there, whereas in the UK that’s been a big shift since the pandemic.
It’s hard to say which is right. You see a lot of people raving about the benefits of working from home, which are definitely there. But you don’t see the downsides, and we are hearing about them. So sometimes people are lacking support if they’re early on in their career, getting buy-in on new projects, or even just the human contact that comes with a face-to-face conversation. And if you live in a big city like London by yourself or in a flat share with people you don’t know that well, coming to the office can be important.
How long have you been active in Cyprus?
We’ve always worked with companies there, even before we founded FinTop. But we opened a physical office there in mid-July, so quite recently. One of our team, Emma, was an HR manager before, she was actually a candidate of ours. She’s from Cyprus but wanted to relocate to the UK, so she came and worked for us in London and has helped us grow our Cypriot business too.
I think the next growth market for us though is Dubai, mainly from a crypto perspective. So we already have a US team that does blockchain and crypto roles. But from a crypto perspective, the Dubai government is really encouraging the sector. They’re putting in place laws and regulations to get brokers and hedge funds to set up there, and a lot of companies have already set up an entity there.
So I’d say London is a hub for us, Cyprus is a hub for us and Dubai is going to be a hub for us in the near future.
One thing I’ve heard about crypto is it’s very hard to hire people. So you have companies asking for developers with vast experience when the industry is only a decade or so old. Is that true?
Not really on the experience side. It is the case that it is hard to find people because you’re dealing with a niche industry. So if you are a crypto company and are looking for a developer that can work with something like ethereum, that’s going to be hard to find. And if you do manage to find someone then they’re going to be expensive, so the company needs to have a good amount of money to be able to hire them.
Based on what you’ve said so far, it does give the impression that London isn’t as good a market to be in as it once was. Is that a fair claim?
I wouldn’t say that, it’s just the types of roles have changed. So if we really wanted to grow the number of retail sales people we were hiring, that would be the case. But the business has just changed, so a lot of people are looking for institutional sales people now and, like I said, there are more marketing hires as well.
But in terms of growth levers, I would say crypto is the main market. In the US and Dubai, mainly for institutional sales, the market is booming and we’re working with a lot of big companies in those markets.
The institutional side of the crypto business does seem more sustainable as well. If you look at recent layoffs, a lot of them were from the retail side where they hadn’t necessarily managed their balance sheets that well to cope with volatility.
Do you think there’s an overlap between the FX/CFD world and crypto? Are you seeing any movement between the two sectors?
Absolutely, I mean if you look at the average retail client for either industry, they’re very similar, if not the same. So all of the retail side, in terms of marketing, customer service, all those things, are very similar. Equally, if you are in institutional sales or operations, and you’re working at a company like LMAX, you can transition easily into a crypto role because the nature of the work is similar.
So there is a direct crossover and we’re seeing it quite a lot. If you’re in retail FX then you can transition over to crypto and the same is true if you’re on the institutional side. We’re seeing it quite a lot already. So if you look at Daniel [Skowronksi] at SquaredFinancial, he was at a couple of FX brokers before and then went into crypto and now he’s back doing crypto at a broker that was traditionally in the FX/CFD market.
Going back to what you said about growth, do you think you’ll end up opening an office in Dubai?
I would say we have to, not just because of the potential in the market but also because of the way business works there. It’s similar to Cyprus where people really like face-to-face interactions. If you look at the UK or US, they’re happy with a video call or telephone call and you can sell yourself that way.
In Dubai people prefer to meet up for a coffee – maybe it’s just an excuse to leave the office, I don’t know. But they do like to meet in person, shake hands, all that sort of stuff. So the long-term aim is likely to get something set up there.
I have noticed a huge number of people moving there in the FX/CFD world. Is that a reflection of what you’re seeing in the wider job market?
Definitely, the market is doing well at the moment over there but you also have to remember that salaries are often higher and tax is lower. Then you have the benefits of living in that part of the world. So if you can earn more and have a higher quality of life, it’s always going to be an appealing option.
So do you think you’ll end up eventually doing most of your business outside of the UK?
No I wouldn’t say so. A lot of our business is in the UK and you also have to keep in mind that companies may hire outside of the country but their headquarters are still in London, so that’s where all the key decisions are going to be made. We also have a lot of key clients here and they continue to hire consistently using our services, so that’s a great position to be in.
To change tack a bit, are there any roles that you see companies consistently struggling to hire for?
Engineers are always difficult to hire just because they have high expectations, they’re always getting headhunted, and salaries often aren’t the main driver for them. Recently we’ve seen that working from home is the main attraction for them and then in interview processes, if that comes up, it can end up putting them off.
But actually for us, one of the problems that comes up a lot is on the institutional sales side. So just for example, if you are working with a big broker and they want a sales person with a client book focused on a specific region, that can be a difficult person to find. Then you have to think that they may not even bring over those clients and during the hiring process they might end up not being totally honest about what those clients are bringing in for them. So we have to vet some of the things they’re saying before we can even consider them as a candidate.
On the client side, you might have a hiring system where they’ll say, ‘how are you going to cover your salary for the first few months?’ That can put off the sales person because a lot of factors are out of their control. If the company they move to has bad spreads or doesn’t offer the same products, for example, their clients may not move over. So it’s a tough one.
To finish off, what trends do you see in the industry? I guess when you hire people, you’re getting an insight into what skills companies are looking for and that can hint at what they’re planning. Aside from that, are there any common mistakes you see companies making when hiring?
I think the main trend is what I said earlier, basically that companies are moving away from a sales person-based approach to one where they work through direct marketing or with affiliates. It’s happened already in London but it seems like something similar is taking place in Cyprus as well.
The biggest error, if that’s the right word, that I see companies making is probably hiring people based on where they’re working now. Brokers will look at other companies and like something they’re doing, so they’ll hire people from there just because they think they’ll be able to replicate that at their company.
I’ll give you an example, if you are a new broker in the UK and you like what Capital.com or eToro are doing, the chances are you’ll try to hire someone from Capital.com or eToro. But that’s not really fair on the candidate because they’re just one person, so you can’t expect them to transform what you’re doing and they might have nothing to do with what you like about those companies. It also means you can end up ignoring candidates at other companies who may be more suited to whatever you’re after.
I’d say the solution to that is to try and come up with different personality and psychometric tests for candidates. So when you’re hiring people, you know that they have the skills you want, but also that they’ll fit with the company culture and they’ll get on with other people, because those are important factors as well.
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