Insights

(Quartz) What does work look like after a pandemic?

Tracy Keogh, Chief Human Resources Officer at HP, shares how work and the workplace will be different after the pandemic has passed, and her first thought is the most simple – the new reality will not match the way things were before. What will change?

Expect uncertainty to persist about when and how employees will return to the physical workspace – there won’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. There will be practical challenges, but it’s hard to say how individuals will react after months in isolation. Employers will need to listen, be supportive, and provide a clear plan to reassure their workforce. Tracy also believes internal communication have already changed and improved. For example, participation in company town halls increased once HP conducted them virtually. What’s next?

In our opinion, company leaders should prepare for an increasingly virtual workplace. It may be generational, but candidates were increasingly requesting (or requiring) remote- and flexible work arrangements before the response to COVID-19 moved us out of the office and into the home office. We do not expect that to slow. Rather, we may have reached a tipping point in manager sentiment in which hiring leaders will be comfortable hiring, onboarding, and leading their teams remotely. This change will have broad-reaching impact on corporate and location strategy, and should open both companies and candidates to new employment opportunities which previously were closed due to location. What do you think? Reach out to say hello and share your thoughts.

Job Interviews Are Broken. There’s a Way to Fix Them.

Adam Grant makes the argument that “Credentials are overrated, and motivation is underrated…” Too often firms focus on past experience, betting on the wrong people (and missing out on the right ones).

How can we avoid those mistakes?

The article suggests that by identifying the key skills and values in advance and then creating a standard set of behavioral and situational questions to ask every candidate will not only lead to better hires but also eliminate potential biases.

But what about those who don’t interview well? Or those who exaggerate to make a better first impression?

Adam suggests that adding work samples to the interview process – something that a candidate has produced in the past (i.e. a project or a live simulation) will be much more telling and predictive.

Suggesting that experience doesn’t matter may be exaggerating the point. That said, I’d rather hire someone who can problem solve and handle conflict vs. reminisce about our experiences in Ithaca, NY.

(NYTimes) We Get, and Give, Lots of Bad Advice. Here’s How to Stop.

In this short read in the Times, Adam Grant, an Organization Psychologist, author, and Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania provides basic tips on how to give better advice and make better decisions ourselves. Grant’s recommendations are 100% applicable to career and recruitment related advice, so we find ourselves thinking about how we’ll best apply it to client and candidate conversations.

As Grant says, we get a lot of bad advice on the receiving end. Sometimes it’s because we’re asking Grandma, but more often it’s because we’re just asking the most accessible person or the person we like the most. The best outcome isn’t guarantee in those scenarios. And when we give advice, we sometimes depend too much on our own experience or successes.

When giving advice, Grant recommends avoiding a single recommendation. Rather, help the person you are advising on a career decision by simply giving them perspective or uncovering blind spots. It will help to clarify their thinking and help them to make the best decision, themselves.

If you did make a recommendation, would you follow your own advice, yourself? When you’re in need of career or recruitment advice, Grant recommends stepping back and thinking about things from a third-person perspective. What would you tell someone else in a similar predicament? He says, “listen to the advice you would give to others. It’s usually the advice you need to take yourself.”

From our experience, people make their own decisions – rarely do they jump blindly at the recommendation of others. We are helpful as consultants by providing information, asking questions, and sometimes challenging their perspective, but otherwise resisting the urge to control the situation. Now, if we can apply the same rigor to our own business, we’ll be on our way. Please keep in touch with us throughout 2020 if you need help, have help to give, or simply want to hear about the challenging recruitment problems we’re tackling.

(Crunchbase) Here’s what you need to know about equity if you’ve been laid off

Sophia Kunthara at Crunchbase presents a simple guide to equity for employees who have been laid off from their companies, including types of equity they might be holding, the time-frames in which ex-employees need to exercise options, how to exercise them, and the tax implications.

From our experience, employees in the fintech world are usually uneducated about the equity they hold – especially how to treat it – and risk losing the opportunity to exercise options post-layoff, if that’s what they hold. Get in touch with HR, Finance, or company leadership immediately to understand how to exercise options you hold, should you choose to. What’s the process? Do you need to do so in person? Is that even possible with COVID-19, work from home, and social distancing? The process may not be quick, so start now.

(FT) AI will rewrite the future of the fund management

In this FT opinion piece (Amin Rajan, CEO of Create Research), the author lays-out an easy-to-visualize picture of the fund industry in the near future, including the forces driving change and the types of fund companies which will exist in the future. But will it be AI that unleashes “a winner-take-all dynamic” as the author states?

This much is less convincing, or at least not fully established. In our recruitment experience, fund companies (big and small) are making massive investments in data infrastructure and ML/AI as it touches each part of their organization, but there are also struggles with adoption, impact, and high costs – especially within the front office. If cost is the “North Star” of the industry, will AI be vessel that carries the industry forward? That remains to be seen.

Stay tuned for an original insight piece where we dive into ML/AI talent in the fund industry.

(Bloomberg) Why Direct Lending Is a Booming Part of Private Debt

Investor demand and their search for yield has contributed to the continued growth of Private Credit and specifically, direct lending in 2019. There seems to be no signs of slowing down in 2020 with 39% of investors saying they expect to increase their commitments to private debt funds in the next 12 months.

What happens when things slow down? Can the non-bank lenders survive?