Financial institutions can compete on their reputation, their rates, and even their marketing, but when it comes down to it, a bank or credit union’s employees are its strongest asset.
Even as technology fuels rapid changes for a traditionally settled industry, banks are still dependent on consistent, shared behaviors amongst the people that drive the organization forward.
For the first time, we’re providing access to our data which shows the most in-demand competencies today for banking industry talent.
Over the past 18 months, HRSG’s systems have crawled over 10 million job posts – about 50,000 of which are for banking positions based in North America.
From there, our advanced machine learning algorithm has categorized and sorted the key knowledge, skills and abilities requested by employers on these job posts into competencies.
In this report, we’ll be looking at universal competencies, which can most easily be summarized as ‘soft skills,’ or desirable behaviors needed for success.
For more info on the basics of competencies, and what practical steps you can take with this data, see the end of this report.
Now, let’s get started. On to the data!
1. Tellers
67%
2. Bank Operations
56%
3. Collections
45%
4. Investing
32%
5. Credit & Lending
28%
6. Compliance & Fraud
3%
What it tells us: In an industry still driven by person-to-person interactions, customer is king and client focus comes in as the most common universal competency across all banking jobs.
Despite the changes that technology has brought to the sector, banking organizations still believe in the importance of providing great service, and want those behaviors to filter throughout most roles in their organization.
We see that this competency is most common for tellers on the front line, but is also in high demand for banking operations staff. Also of note, only jobs categorized in the “Customer Service & Support” category had a greater prevalence of this competency.
Client Focus in all Job Categories:
What it tells us: It makes some sense that planning and organizing comes in at number two, as these are skills and behaviors needed across a wide range of jobs across the industry.
No subgroup of jobs had this on less than 25% of their jobs, which is the high-water mark for consistency across our top 10 banking competencies.
1. Compliance & Fraud
43%
2. Tellers
43%
3. Bank Operations
36%
4. Collections
28%
5. Investing
25%
6. Credit & Lending
25%
Planning & Organizing in all job categories:
What it tells us: Fostering communication is the behavior of listening and communicating openly, honestly and respectfully with different audiences.
We see this reflected in the two subgroups (compliance & fraud and collections) where this competency is most in-demand, and where the personnel often deals with tricky or sensitive conversations in their day-to-day responsibilities.
1. Compliance & Fraud
51%
2. Collections
42%
3. Tellers
40%
4. Bank Operations
37%
5. Credit & Lending
27%
6. Investing
22%
Fostering Communication in all job categories:
What it tells us: Though they may not be at the top of their organizations, tellers’ attention to detail needs to be impeccable -- or their organizations may bear the cost. Whether it’s a complicated financial transaction or a simple withdrawal, accuracy is vital.
1. Tellers
50%
2. Collections
26%
3. Credit & Lending
16%
4. Bank Operations
15%
5. Investing
13%
6. Compliance & Fraud
4%
Attention to Detail in all job categories:
What it tells us: Customers want to know that their hard-earned dollars are in safe, trustworthy and professional hands. We see this reflected in the types of people that banking industry organizations are looking for, and in the strong emphasis on professional-oriented behaviors in their job descriptions.
1. Tellers
42%
2. Bank Operations
35%
3. Credit & Lending
14%
4. Investing
14%
5. Collections
14%
6. Compliance & Fraud
9%
Professionalism across all job categories:
Collaborating with Others across all job categories:
Problem Solving across all job categories:
Achievement Orientation across all job categories:
Ensuring Accountability across all job categories:
Partnering across all job categories:
Here are 6 more competencies that landed just outside the top 10 competencies we captured, and their prevalence as compared to our pool of over 10 million jobs crawled by our AI.
Throughout this report, we've looked at the most common, universal competencies that banking organizations are asking for from their employees. Why competencies and not skills? Quite simply because in a work setting competencies are more useful than skills.
Competencies define observable and measurable behaviors needed for successful performance. It’s one thing to say that recruiting for Client Focus is critical, but how can you separate one candidate from another on Client Focus? And what about after you’ve found that perfect candidate – how do you support their ongoing Client Focus development?
Competencies give managers and HR professionals the tools they need at every step of an employee’s journey – from candidate through to development and promotion:
More questions about competencies?
Access our free guide to building a competency framework - a thorough look at competencies from the ground up.
For three decades, HRSG has delivered products and services to define talent needs, address skill deficiencies and improve individual and organizational performance.
Our Products division has distilled that 30 years of expertise into a competency, job description and career management software solution. Leveraging the power of AI, CompetencyCore is unlike any other product on the market, bringing together the power of competencies and the utility of job descriptions.
Our Talent Management Solutions division delivers modern talent management solutions in competency-based management, testing and assessment. In addition, we train HR professionals worldwide in our competency-based management methodologies.
To learn more about how HRSG makes HR professionals proactive and in-control of their HR processes, visit us at www.hrsg.ca.
