Thu, 04-Dec-2008
Hunting high and low
Published: Dec 01, 2007
The hunt for top talent in the finance sector is getting brutal as aggressive growth in Asia Pacific markets continues undaunted by the US credit crunch. To make sure Credit Suisse can fuel its business strategy with the best minds the bank’s HR director Southeast Asia Kristie Ellards leaves no stone unturned.
Stepping onto the private banking floor of Credit Suisse's Raffles Link office is like stepping into an oasis of calm. The floor, which hosts clients for its private banking sector is flanked on each side by birch-coloured wooden panels, complemented with white doors etched with the names of various financial hubs including Tokyo and Zurich and of course Singapore. Even the private meeting rooms, with their satin plum sofas and windows that overlook the City Hall concourse, exude the same feeling of serenity.
Not that there isn’t a flurry of activity on the other floors where all the action takes place.
On the day that Human Resources visited the offices, Kristie Ellard, director of HR, Southeast Asia, has got a full load on her plate. She has to plan for an upcoming company trip to Pune, where one of two Credit Suisse’s support office is located at – the other is closer to home in the heart of Marina Bay.
Ellard then has to discuss some pressing staff issues with her boss, the HR director for Asia, who has flown into town from Hong Kong. Later in the day Ellard has a scheduled conference call with the newly appointed director of HR IT who is stationed in Zurich.
And the there is the usual backlog of overnight emails from the Zurich and New York offices, as well as her regular meetings with the senior control officer and country manager of Credit Suisse’s Singapore office.
As busy as Ellard’s day gets, it is probably going to be even busier in the years to come, as she plays a pivotal role in Credit Suisse’s plans to recruit 2,000 more people in Asia in the next two years – a staggering 50% addition to 5,500 current headcount in Asia.
Recruitment 2.0
The insatiable appetite for talent in the finance sector, and at Credit Suisse, is driven by a red hot market in Singapore and Southeast Asia which has been heating up for some time. This means top talent is highly sought after and not easy to come by.
So it falls to Ellard to lead Credit Suisse through this challenge, as the bank looks towards expanding its headcount across the three business lines of investment banking, private banking and asset management.
The UK-born HR practitioner says the countries where the bulk of new hires are likely go to include the established financial hubs of Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. But offices in emerging markets like Pakistan were also hungry for talent. But more than just adding warm bodies Ellard is on the hunt for specialised talent.
The biggest challenge for Ellard at the moment is finding the right type of people who are not only technically competent in their work, but who also reflect the core values of Credit Suisse.
“While it is fantastic that you are a great private banker, but above and beyond that, finding people with the right attitude and the right qualities would be the recruitment challenge,” she says.
To support the business function, even the HR department has to shape up dramatically. This is since not many HR functions in Singapore and Asia have a level of maturity to support the business effectively, says Ellard. Citing from personal experience, Ellard said that when she joined Credit Suisse in 1999, her role as a HR generalist included “a little bit of everything”. Since then, Ellard has managed to help the bank grow its number of specialist HR personnel to a staff strength of 120, including those from the Business School and other on-site vendors, which supports a mixture of global, regional and local staff.
She says the challenge has been to recruit an agile team of HR specialists in areas such as lateral recruitment and campus recruitment and then develop them fast to meet pressing business needs.
In late 2006 the HR team at Credit Suisse was facing a dilemma. Should the bank partner with a third-party vendor or grow their own talent for the year ahead? A decision was taken to partner with third-party vendor, Alexandra Mann, to provide lateral support for Credit Suisse’s human resources function.
“We went down the route of partnership because it leveraged their expertise. We were able to ramp up quickly and deliver a service to the client,” she goes on to say.
Thinking outside the bank
In a tough talent market one strategy Credit Suisse undertook was to seek talent outside of traditional sourcing pools, one place Credit Suisse tapped into was the Singapore Air Force.
Here Ellard found recruits who possessed some excellent and transferable qualities including good management and communications skills and the ability to think analytically. To help transition candidates from a uniformed environment into a private corporate environment Ellard enlisted the help of Credit Suisse’s Business School.
“We partner very closely with our colleagues in the Business School to support the transition into Credit Suisse in the on-boarding and training programmes,” she says Ellard.
Expanding the geographical reach for candidate searches was another way to diversify the Credit Suisse talent pool, this included a recent campaign to recruit Filipino employees to work in the Singapore office.
Ellard says due to the ferocity of the competition in Singapore, with its inequitable high demand and low supply of people, it was “irresponsible” for HR to keep relying on that single pipeline of talent.
“There are a lot of banks in Singapore and a relatively low supply of people. So you can either keep going back to the source, but it would bid up the price. Or you can look to broaden the base and grow your own people,” she says.
Another way of strengthening the pipeline is Credit Suisse’s “Excelerate” programme, which aims to plug recruitment shortages by grooming high-potentials into relationship managers within a relatively short period of time. The programme, which was first inaugurated in Singapore before being rolled out to Hong Kong, will see its first cohort of 28 graduates in 2008.
Depending on the level of experience and the pace of the individual, the talent would be put through formal education as well as a senior mentoring programme by senior bankers anywhere between one to two years. Some of the areas that the programme covers include the bank’s culture and values, product knowledge, processes and systems, sales as well as personal effectiveness.
Appointing and engaging young talent
In a recent JobCentral survey, Credit Suisse was ranked by undergraduates in Singapore universities as the second most desirable company to work with. The results are a strong testament to the bank’s employee value to potential recruits, and an important result as well for an organisation which hires between 80 to 100 fresh graduates each year from the NUS, NTU and SMU campuses.
The challenges to harvesting grads are twofold Ellard says, with the first trying to lure the best people on campus. Even as students, those at the top of their fields have plenty of opportunities laid out before them, and trying to position the bank as an employer of choice in that environment is a constant challenge.
The other difficulty she faces in Singapore is trying to convey the right message to the students, who may have the impression that its IT and shared services department that support the three business units does not offer a viable career.
In order to correct this impression, Credit Suisse gets its senior managers involved.
“It has taken senior managers going on campuses and talking to students to convey the message to get the message across that the back offices is a viable career, and isn’t just a stepping stone to the front office. The shared services are pro-active and are there to support the execution of the bank strategy,” Ellard says.
The thread of diversification in Credit Suisse’s HR strategy continues with its student hires. The bank not only recruits from the expected business and accounting facilities, but also graduates from the various fields of engineering.
When it comes to the young graduates, Ellard finds that young hires are most attracted towards the learning and development opportunities of Credit Suisse - which naturally plays a key role in campus recruitment.
Thus, one of the incentives the bank propositions the new hires is its Business School, which has five campuses worldwide, including Singapore and Hong Kong. Not only does it teach courses across its three core businesses, but it also schools attendees in the areas of leadership and management development. In 2006 alone, the Business School saw 25,000 attendances in over 700 Business School programs across all banking divisions in the Asia Pacific region.
“In our presentation on campus, we talk about the on-boarding process and the training and development opportunities here. The Business School is an important part of the overall offering from a human capital perspective.”
With the incessant media reports of the monetary incentives that the financial industry dangles in order to lure talent, Ellard says the bank does not believe in recruiting from that route.
She agrees the bank has to get compensation “right”, but adds that bank’s employee value proposition has more in store than just money incentives alone. “I honestly believe that other career opportunities, client base and the geographic reach that we have is the reason why people join Credit Suisse,” she says.
Managing a diverse workforce
Credit Suisse also believes that diversity in the workforce “breeds” innovation and as part of its commitment to mixing up the workforce it appoints a head of diversity in the Singapore office who is responsible for all aspects of diversity and inclusion within the Asia Pacific region.
“Diversity is not just about age, or gender. It is about different approaches and different thinking and new perspectives so that we get the most innovative solutions for our clients,” Ellard says.
The commitment towards diversity starts right from top management with the “Creating More Franchise Through Inclusion” programme. Ellard says the leadership programme is rolled out in numerous offices as the bank’s way of “supporting managers and leaders to best leverage and manage diverse work groups”.
In addition to that, all employees in Credit Suisse have to undergo a mandatory online programme titled “Dignity At Work”. The programme explains to employees the bank’s commitment to equal opportunity to all its employees, and creating an environment around an understanding of the bank’s policies.
Working together with HR, the diversity department ensures that there is a rigorous and robust standard of ensuring that people are promoted on the basis of “quality and merit”.
Ultimately, Ellard says, “The fundamental belief is that a diverse team breeds innovation, and produces better ideas and meet the needs of the client better.”
This means not only taking the hunt for talent out of your comfort zone, but making sure you can nurture and manage a team made up of traditional and non-traditional talent. Get this right and you won’t have to rely on fishing in the same pool everyone else is when the talent crunch is on.
Stepping onto the private banking floor of Credit Suisse's Raffles Link office is like stepping into an oasis of calm. The floor, which hosts clients for its private banking sector is flanked on each side by birch-coloured wooden panels, complemented with white doors etched with the names of various financial hubs including Tokyo and Zurich and of course Singapore. Even the private meeting rooms, with their satin plum sofas and windows that overlook the City Hall concourse, exude the same feeling of serenity.
Not that there isn’t a flurry of activity on the other floors where all the action takes place.
On the day that Human Resources visited the offices, Kristie Ellard, director of HR, Southeast Asia, has got a full load on her plate. She has to plan for an upcoming company trip to Pune, where one of two Credit Suisse’s support office is located at – the other is closer to home in the heart of Marina Bay.
Ellard then has to discuss some pressing staff issues with her boss, the HR director for Asia, who has flown into town from Hong Kong. Later in the day Ellard has a scheduled conference call with the newly appointed director of HR IT who is stationed in Zurich.
And the there is the usual backlog of overnight emails from the Zurich and New York offices, as well as her regular meetings with the senior control officer and country manager of Credit Suisse’s Singapore office.
As busy as Ellard’s day gets, it is probably going to be even busier in the years to come, as she plays a pivotal role in Credit Suisse’s plans to recruit 2,000 more people in Asia in the next two years – a staggering 50% addition to 5,500 current headcount in Asia.
Recruitment 2.0
The insatiable appetite for talent in the finance sector, and at Credit Suisse, is driven by a red hot market in Singapore and Southeast Asia which has been heating up for some time. This means top talent is highly sought after and not easy to come by.
So it falls to Ellard to lead Credit Suisse through this challenge, as the bank looks towards expanding its headcount across the three business lines of investment banking, private banking and asset management.
The UK-born HR practitioner says the countries where the bulk of new hires are likely go to include the established financial hubs of Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. But offices in emerging markets like Pakistan were also hungry for talent. But more than just adding warm bodies Ellard is on the hunt for specialised talent.
The biggest challenge for Ellard at the moment is finding the right type of people who are not only technically competent in their work, but who also reflect the core values of Credit Suisse.
“While it is fantastic that you are a great private banker, but above and beyond that, finding people with the right attitude and the right qualities would be the recruitment challenge,” she says.
To support the business function, even the HR department has to shape up dramatically. This is since not many HR functions in Singapore and Asia have a level of maturity to support the business effectively, says Ellard. Citing from personal experience, Ellard said that when she joined Credit Suisse in 1999, her role as a HR generalist included “a little bit of everything”. Since then, Ellard has managed to help the bank grow its number of specialist HR personnel to a staff strength of 120, including those from the Business School and other on-site vendors, which supports a mixture of global, regional and local staff.
She says the challenge has been to recruit an agile team of HR specialists in areas such as lateral recruitment and campus recruitment and then develop them fast to meet pressing business needs.
In late 2006 the HR team at Credit Suisse was facing a dilemma. Should the bank partner with a third-party vendor or grow their own talent for the year ahead? A decision was taken to partner with third-party vendor, Alexandra Mann, to provide lateral support for Credit Suisse’s human resources function.
“We went down the route of partnership because it leveraged their expertise. We were able to ramp up quickly and deliver a service to the client,” she goes on to say.
Thinking outside the bank
In a tough talent market one strategy Credit Suisse undertook was to seek talent outside of traditional sourcing pools, one place Credit Suisse tapped into was the Singapore Air Force.
Here Ellard found recruits who possessed some excellent and transferable qualities including good management and communications skills and the ability to think analytically. To help transition candidates from a uniformed environment into a private corporate environment Ellard enlisted the help of Credit Suisse’s Business School.
“We partner very closely with our colleagues in the Business School to support the transition into Credit Suisse in the on-boarding and training programmes,” she says Ellard.
Expanding the geographical reach for candidate searches was another way to diversify the Credit Suisse talent pool, this included a recent campaign to recruit Filipino employees to work in the Singapore office.
Ellard says due to the ferocity of the competition in Singapore, with its inequitable high demand and low supply of people, it was “irresponsible” for HR to keep relying on that single pipeline of talent.
“There are a lot of banks in Singapore and a relatively low supply of people. So you can either keep going back to the source, but it would bid up the price. Or you can look to broaden the base and grow your own people,” she says.
Another way of strengthening the pipeline is Credit Suisse’s “Excelerate” programme, which aims to plug recruitment shortages by grooming high-potentials into relationship managers within a relatively short period of time. The programme, which was first inaugurated in Singapore before being rolled out to Hong Kong, will see its first cohort of 28 graduates in 2008.
Depending on the level of experience and the pace of the individual, the talent would be put through formal education as well as a senior mentoring programme by senior bankers anywhere between one to two years. Some of the areas that the programme covers include the bank’s culture and values, product knowledge, processes and systems, sales as well as personal effectiveness.
Appointing and engaging young talent
In a recent JobCentral survey, Credit Suisse was ranked by undergraduates in Singapore universities as the second most desirable company to work with. The results are a strong testament to the bank’s employee value to potential recruits, and an important result as well for an organisation which hires between 80 to 100 fresh graduates each year from the NUS, NTU and SMU campuses.
The challenges to harvesting grads are twofold Ellard says, with the first trying to lure the best people on campus. Even as students, those at the top of their fields have plenty of opportunities laid out before them, and trying to position the bank as an employer of choice in that environment is a constant challenge.
The other difficulty she faces in Singapore is trying to convey the right message to the students, who may have the impression that its IT and shared services department that support the three business units does not offer a viable career.
In order to correct this impression, Credit Suisse gets its senior managers involved.
“It has taken senior managers going on campuses and talking to students to convey the message to get the message across that the back offices is a viable career, and isn’t just a stepping stone to the front office. The shared services are pro-active and are there to support the execution of the bank strategy,” Ellard says.
The thread of diversification in Credit Suisse’s HR strategy continues with its student hires. The bank not only recruits from the expected business and accounting facilities, but also graduates from the various fields of engineering.
When it comes to the young graduates, Ellard finds that young hires are most attracted towards the learning and development opportunities of Credit Suisse - which naturally plays a key role in campus recruitment.
Thus, one of the incentives the bank propositions the new hires is its Business School, which has five campuses worldwide, including Singapore and Hong Kong. Not only does it teach courses across its three core businesses, but it also schools attendees in the areas of leadership and management development. In 2006 alone, the Business School saw 25,000 attendances in over 700 Business School programs across all banking divisions in the Asia Pacific region.
“In our presentation on campus, we talk about the on-boarding process and the training and development opportunities here. The Business School is an important part of the overall offering from a human capital perspective.”
With the incessant media reports of the monetary incentives that the financial industry dangles in order to lure talent, Ellard says the bank does not believe in recruiting from that route.
She agrees the bank has to get compensation “right”, but adds that bank’s employee value proposition has more in store than just money incentives alone. “I honestly believe that other career opportunities, client base and the geographic reach that we have is the reason why people join Credit Suisse,” she says.
Managing a diverse workforce
Credit Suisse also believes that diversity in the workforce “breeds” innovation and as part of its commitment to mixing up the workforce it appoints a head of diversity in the Singapore office who is responsible for all aspects of diversity and inclusion within the Asia Pacific region.
“Diversity is not just about age, or gender. It is about different approaches and different thinking and new perspectives so that we get the most innovative solutions for our clients,” Ellard says.
The commitment towards diversity starts right from top management with the “Creating More Franchise Through Inclusion” programme. Ellard says the leadership programme is rolled out in numerous offices as the bank’s way of “supporting managers and leaders to best leverage and manage diverse work groups”.
In addition to that, all employees in Credit Suisse have to undergo a mandatory online programme titled “Dignity At Work”. The programme explains to employees the bank’s commitment to equal opportunity to all its employees, and creating an environment around an understanding of the bank’s policies.
Working together with HR, the diversity department ensures that there is a rigorous and robust standard of ensuring that people are promoted on the basis of “quality and merit”.
Ultimately, Ellard says, “The fundamental belief is that a diverse team breeds innovation, and produces better ideas and meet the needs of the client better.”
This means not only taking the hunt for talent out of your comfort zone, but making sure you can nurture and manage a team made up of traditional and non-traditional talent. Get this right and you won’t have to rely on fishing in the same pool everyone else is when the talent crunch is on.
