Finance Monthly August 2019 Edition

49 www.finance-monthly.com FINANCIAL INNOVATION & FINTECH - MONZO the best Customer Operations team. We don’t just need bodies; we need personable people with the right problem-solving skills to provide the customer service we expect.” One of the byproducts of achievement is demand, and in the Autumn of 2018, Monzo felt the full force of their success. They found themselves in need of 60 new full-time employees and set the ambitious target of having them all hired by Christmas – a huge task for a company so young. Hind tells us that the start-up was running at full capacity, holding two to three assessments each week which they were sometimes struggling to fill. “So, we needed to find other ways of sourcing great candidates”, she adds. Start-ups such as Monzo are in existence to disrupt the industries, and their recruitment process should be no different. Technology is central to their evolution, and video-based hiring was the answer to their concerns. It provided an opportunity to improve the quality of candidates, whilst simultaneously simplifying the process. This not only saved time and therefore money, but also had the added benefit of meaning people could be onboarded in the recruitment team with minimal training. Hind explains that “what’s great about Tempo is that they give us control of the process. We could choose to put less emphasis on previous experience and instead focus on the candidate’s soft skills. We really needed to assess skills like empathy from the start. There’s usually no emotion or personality in a CV. It can be very difficult to get an idea of someone’s soft skills by looking at a list of jobs they’ve done. With Tempo, we see a 30-second video introduction from the candidate, and we could ask applicants questions in real-time. This meant we could see how they reacted to challenging situations, before inviting them to an assessment day.” Through optimising their recruitment process through technology, Monzo managed to hire 200 people, as opposed to the initial (albeit ambitious) target of 60. Efficiency and peace of mind are what Monzo now associate the recruitment process with, phrases that typically don’t spring to mind when organisations are hiring. “Tempo has been an incredibly useful tool for our recruitment process. Rather than hiring the 60 people we set out to, we’ve been able to hire 200! They were the best choice for getting in quality candidates, quickly. The main differences have been in two areas – efficiency and peace of mind. Some of our assessment days had a 50% success rate. As anyone in the recruitment industry will confirm, that’s a fantastic return.” “We’re now able to immediately see which candidates are engaging and would fit our culture before we invite them to assessment days. As a result, we’ve been able to host larger and more successful assessment days. That’s saved our team of four a huge amount of time and effort, which we can spend on hiring for technical roles or improving onboarding and internal processes”, added Ali.