Tag: scouting

Scouting Early Finance Talent. Too soon? Or Not Enough?

Wall Street’s talent scouts set their sights on increasing and diversifying their talent pipeline.

Lulu Yilun Chen writes how firms like Citadel and Nomura are tapping into high school talent through innovative training programs in her recent Bloomberg piece (Bloomberg).

Image A room full of teenagers, managing (fictitious) $20 million portfolios. There are shouts of stock ticker names and adrenaline courses through the veins of kids engaged in this high-stakes activity. How well do these finance games identify and nurture early talent? And,

Why the push for younger recruits? The job market is increasingly more competitive. Readers of this blog know that I reference Anton Cheremukhin and Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria working paper often. Since 2015, the number of vacancies intended for employed talent steadily increases — more employers intend to poach talent than recruit unemployed talent. The ramification for the manager is to double down efforts to retain existing talent while building out a pipeline of future talent to mitigate the risk of poachers.

Wall Street firms might be noticing the risk of talent poachers and executing on a strategy to build out pipelines of early talent. Setting up finance games in financial hubs like Hong Kong where opportunities are dwindling gives early talent, students, a chance to get ahead. For firms, it’s about diversifying their talent pool and finding early diamonds in the rough.

My Thoughts

Upside: There’s tremendous value in exposure to opportunity for people who are may not have built-in familial connections or social capital. Additionally, firms get an opportunity to first hand see talent that they may not have seen through more traditional channels.

Downside: What effects will we see in how young people’s horizons get shaped. Might these games narrow someone’s career ambitions and dreams?

One Useful Action

Create opportunities for people to engage in your work. Tech recruiters love “hackathons”. I attended pitch nights at a youth tech accelerator and found that to be a fantastic way of identifying potential talent.

Ultimately – do what you can to put yourself in situations where you can be exposed to new and different talent.

Are you talking enough about talent?

As a leader, do you have a network of leaders you can discuss talent spotting with? Here are two simple questions I like to ask:

  1. If you looked at 5 (insert position – “nurses”) candidates of comparable skill, experience, and education – what does the truly special candidate exhibit that the others don’t?
  2. Are you scouting talent? If not, how does the firm actively scout talent?
  3. What signals do you, not your recruiters, look for in the market to know that someone highly talented is available?
  4. How are you signaling that you’re open to talking to talent?

If a manager’s products are decisions, then how they decide to spot and scout talent cannot be discounted.

Find a couple of peers, or level ups, and start talkin’.