Interview advice
Take a look at these videos for all the information you need to nail your next treasury interview – in the real or virtual world. Discover the most important things you should be doing prior, during and after the interview.
Mastering a Virtual Interview Preparing Executing Earning An Offer
Getting the job, you deserve in 2021 means you need to become a master of the virtual interview.
Certain things about a virtual interview and an in-person interview are the same, including your preparation.
That is why Mike Richards, the leading global Treasury recruiter and Ernie Humphrey, the CEO of Treasury Webinars & 360 Thought Leadership Consulting join forces to headline this webinar to share their insights about what you need to do to;
* Set yourself apart from your fellow interviewees
* Convey your value proposition effectively
* Help land your dream role in 2021
A Quick Guide to Virtual Interviewing
With over 20 years of Treasury Recruitment experience, Mike Richards recently shared his secrets to career success and how to land your dream role with the Treasury Management Association of Chicago, TMAC.
Over the past two decades the world of Treasury Recruitment has changed beyond belief - it is not enough anymore to just have the perfect resume to get ahead in your career, you need to build an online personal brand that not only captures the attention of your audience but presents a powerful message to those seeking your treasury expertise.
In his session the audience gained key insights from a global treasury recruiter who has advised corporate treasury professionals on how to advance their treasury careers for decades.
The session included;
- Top tips on how to craft a strong resume
- How to create a standout and powerful LinkedIn profile / personal brand
- A guide to what you should and shouldn’t be doing in this new world of virtual interviewing
Speaker
Mike Richards, CEO & Founder of The Treasury Recruitment Company
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrtreasury/
Mike@TreasuryRecruitment.com
Established in 2002, The Treasury Recruitment Company are the only truly Global Treasury Recruitment firm in the world. They recruit at all levels within Corporate Treasury from Treasury Analyst to Treasury Director for multinational corporates, consultancies, and a range of financial institutions.
Mike regularly speaks at Treasury Recruitment conferences such as the Windy City Summit – Chicago, the AFP USA Treasurers Conference and the EuroFinance International Treasurers Conference about;
The power of personal branding
How to attract, manage and retain treasury talent
The latest trends happening within the global treasury recruitment market.
In addition, Mike also hosts the popular podcast www.TreasuryCareerCorner.com where he interviews treasury professionals about their careers.
Their company website is www.TreasuryRecruitment.com
Recruit the Same People and You Get the Same Results - Plan for Succession NOW!
Recruit the Same People and You Get the Same Results - Plan for Succession NOW!
Hey guys, it is Mike Richards from The Treasury Recruitment Company here.
Within this video I am going to try and highlight Fred our client who I've
written about in the blog and who has gone a bit insane.
The reason I called him Fred is because we do not have a client called Fred. If you are a client called Fred and you want to then call us.
Give us a call. Anyway, Fred who we will call it. He is a typical client I get a lot of the time. I get the phone call “Mike, our Treasury Manager is leaving after just 12 months in the role.
I said, Fred 12 months is a bit short. Can I ask why you think they are leaving? “Mike, I don't care,
I just need another person. They came in, they did the job for me for a year and it has not quite worked out. Just another body”. I am like really?
This is where my advice comes from really. It is about trying to stop our clients doing the same patterns again, and again, and expecting different results.
I know Treasurers and CFO’s are under intense pressure to get results and deliver things.
So, when your Treasury Manager if you like leaves, you can just recruit quick get on. I know there is several my rivals who would just think it is great another pay check, another 12 months.
Lovely. I do not want to do that.
The rough rule of thumb I have for typical development if you like is of treasury professionals in the first year you are learning a lot.
Second year you are into that next cycle, so you are repeating it through.
The third year,
you are improving things again, maybe starting to look at promotion and growing from there.
So, there is a natural cycle, you know, perhaps three years’ time for a change.
But what I want to try and encourage my clients who are hopefully watching this, is before their Treasury Manager even resigns, I ask my clients;
- What have you been doing to train your Treasury Analysts over the past 12 months?
- What if your Manager were to leave? If you promoted your Treasury Analyst, I know it is a smaller fee, but you keep that knowledge within the company and get progression.
- Have you also asked your outgoing person why they are leaving?
- What could you have done to prevent it? If this keeps happening,
I am very happy to keep taking your money, but I do not feel good about it.
Maybe what you should be doing is thinking about bringing someone in on
the training curves. What is the succession planning?
I know everyone talks about it. But if you commit to that now you are going to stop this pattern.
You cannot keep doing the same thing over and repeatedly and expect different results, it is not going to happen.
So, commit to succession planning. Think about training your team now before it becomes too late.
It is probably the best advice I can give you, have a look internally.
Have a sit down and if you want more of us, give us a call. That is enough for this week.
Many thanks for your time.
Here’s the links to some useful articles:
https://treasuryrecruitment.com/same-people-same-results/
https://treasuryrecruitment.com/effective-interviewing/
The Best Way to Structure an Interview Process
Hey guys, it's Mike Richards from The Treasury Recruitment Company here.
Hopefully a shorter one this week because this focuses on a brief article about how you shouldn't structure an interview process.
In the blog/article, whatever you want to call it, you'll see I give a very direct example of a practical situation that we faced recently
when we're working with one of our clients.
They discovered and we were working with them on what was a critical hire for them. They were formulating their master plan, how to get the people and make sure they got people at the right level.
We came up with this in-depth idea of doing testing then a 45-minute interview with HR, then once they got through those, for second round interviews they bring the Group Treasurer level people back for a one hour meeting. Bearing in mind they weren't based in central London, so difficult to get to in the middle of England.
So I said, look guys, you're not going to get these people through the doors.
I would be getting senior Treasurers, the three senior Treasurers when they
started to speak to me saying, Mike, I can't do that.
I outlined this to the client and managed to change it around a little bit by combining the meeting with the CFO at the first round with the testing, we made sure they were the right level of expertise then when they came back, they were already bought into the company if you like.
They wanted to then be part of the company.
Two out of the four people brought back both wanted the job. They were bought into the process. We use the meetings with the HR guys and some of the other people in the business, the second round, for them to better understand the business.
So as it turned out, by the time we got an offer it was an easy process and both of the final finalists wanted the job and that's what you guys have to do out there.
It's like we said in one of our first ever videos, "it's not about you anymore, remember, it's about them."
Think about the candidates first.
You can still structure a process how you want it to, but maybe think about getting their buy-in rather than your process coming first.
That's it I’m going to stop, enough for this week.
Have a look at the article. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope it helps and I'll see you soon.
Here’s the links to some useful articles:
https://treasuryrecruitment.com/intelligent-interviewing/
https://treasuryrecruitment.com/effective-interviewing/
Why You Need to Profile, Position, Prospect & Plan to Retain Your Treasury Talent
Another video this week as a result of another session I delivered to a group of Treasurers at an international treasury conference.
We were talking about team planning with them and we boil it down to what we call our four P’s.
There was Profiling, Positioning, Prospecting and Planning, and you'll see that in the article and we explain that and break it down a little bit more.
The weird thing is I don't actually know why I keep doing these sessions
and these videos, because I was trying to do myself out of a job!
I was trying to give them advice about how not to lose staff.
Now, let me explain a little bit more before I go completely broke or completely mad.
Whichever comes first!
Profiling - looking at your current team.
What we were saying is look at your current team and see what you've already got there.
What skills are you missing and
what training can you give to fill in those blanks? And looking at the perfect member for your team.
What does your ideal look like? And how can you help those guys get to that ideal?
How can you sort of mentor them, train them and stuff like that.
So with that, it was a simple identification exercise to make sure you're fit
for purpose if you like.
The next P is Positioning, this is
when you start to look if you are going to have to look externally,
where are you going to look? Have you already and before you do your external search.
maybe you do an internal search and you decide what is your ‘sell’?
Why would someone want to come and work in treasury?
What's it going to do for their career? Do you have an employer brand if you like?
Why would they want to join and then stay in your team?
What are the current members of your team do and can you coach them?
All of those ideas were really good about the positioning.
One of the people that was at that session was a lady called Séverine Le Blévennec, one of our podcast guests and an amazing Treasurer of Honeywell.
Now she actually goes out on a regular basis and works with the local degree program
and helps train junior Treasury people. She has found it a great way of introducing people to the profession. Keeps me out and stops me placing people with a her. Damn her!
Anyway Prospecting, what other internal resources are there.
Could you use your HR team?. Do they actually know
what treasury is. Have you coached them enough?
And what other ways of finding people in the past have been successful, look at that.
So you've got all those and the final one was Planning, succession planning.
Before you actually think about recruiting or you get to that stage.
Have you planned for your success? Maybe you could train up someone internally.
Give them a year's worth of training to become the Treasury Manager, retaining that
talent and identifying the gaps. Have a read through the article, they give you a lot more information. Hope that's helpful today.
Thanks for your time and I look forward to the next one. Many Thanks.
Put Candidates First & Attract Them to You or You Won’t Recruit Your Role
Hi everyone! I’m Mike Richards and I run The Treasury Recruitment Company.
I'm here today to try to bring to life some of the advice we've been giving through our recent blog posts.
The most recent one you might have seen is ‘It's not about you anymore, it's about them’. What I mean by that, well, I don't know if you've read the article, but I thoroughly recommend it as a decent lunch time read.
But what I did is I wrote the article because I wanted to try to explain to some of our clients why they need to stand in the shoes if you like, of some of the candidates when they're applying for jobs.
I want them to, for some of them remember quite a long time ago, what it was like for them
when they were looking to their first role and think about the candidate first.
A lot of my clients don't seem to have that thought process and it's quite frustrating.
They have this kind of "me-mindset "if you like about why wouldn't want someone wants to come and join us. Well, we're amazing, we’re great!
You might well be a great amazing company, I know that. Some of our clients do have amazing opportunities, but in some of the job descriptions you give to me and the adverts you write, it's like you then expect people to flock to your door, and it's not like that anymore the world's changed. You need to try and think about the candidates if you like and sell the role.
Imagine you're sitting there, you're a Treasury Analyst or Manager and you're looking for your next opportunity and where you're going to go to next. You need to sell that dream
and attract someone to come in the door and join you guys.
So tell them, what makes you special?
Why would they come and join your company?
What will be career enhancing for someone to join you if you like? One of the practical examples I gave in the actual article is, I've got a great consultancy client, they give some great advice to Treasury teams and departments and they're looking to recruit some consultants.
They said to me at the beginning “Mike, what we want to do first of all, give these guys a case study and how they're going to approach a tricky problem”.
I was like, “What? have you gone mad!”. They were like, no we are going to give them this it will show us their thinking and everything else. I went “I don't care!”
You've got it the wrong way round as a client. You need to entice someone to join you in the room first of all, not turn them away. I said to them look, we need to change the process round and it proved to be very successful because what we said is look, we'll find you some great people, get you sitting with them over a coffee and explain to them what consultancies about.
That way they buy into the process, they understand consultancy. You don't actually waste your time because if they're not interested in the role after that,
you don't go through a big process and everything else. And I know you might have some trepidation and nervousness about what do they do next?
But, you know, see if they would you like to come in and get them in for a coffee.
You have a coffee, they like you, it's an equal sharing thing.
Then you move them and say, yeah this person will be great for consultancy or no
they're not and actually nobody's lost out because their time is not wasted.
You've got a cultural fit, they've got the same and you can start to assess the person.
So then you do that case study and it's worked very well. And now that's the hiring process they employ. So as I say, I know its a bit of a long video today, but I wanted to try and get across to you that you should make their needs primary, yours secondary.
As I say candidate comes first. "It's not about you anymore, It's about them."
Thanks very much.
Easy! Watch this video and read this article and I answer that very question!
https://treasuryrecruitment.com/its-about-candidates/
Bounce Back 1 Week 5: Group Zoom Call – Effective Interviewing & Advice
A recording of the ZOOM call Mike Richards and our Bounce Back Candidate Program members had on week five.
8 Useful Tips to Nail that Job Interview
In this video I give my top tips about what to do when you are actually there in the interview itself.
Tips include;
- dressing to impress, being positive but without being arrogant
- why being loyal to your current employer is important
- get to the point and answer the question!
- why you need to know your CV / resume inside out and you need to be able to explain why you want this job
- why you need to always have a question for them!
TO DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHEETS THAT ACCOMPANY THE VIDEO GO HERE
https://treasuryrecruitment.com/how-to-be-successful-at-your-next-job-interview/
Week 5: Effective Interviewing
In week 5, Mike works with you to prepare for that all-important interview. He shares advice and tips to ensure you are fully prepared.
Link to Week 5 Group Call Advice About How to Interview Effectively
https://youtu.be/fe473SpPNUU