Hi, this is Stephanie Maas, partner with Thinking Ahead Search Firm, and today I wanna talk to you about the number one problem in banking.
Nope, it's not risk.
It's not compliance.
It's not a flat economy.
It's not the regulators.
Oh, don't get me wrong, that's an issue, but regulations, that's not our biggest problem.
Our biggest problem is the talent shortage.
Did you know that there are 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day in the United States?
That is leaving us with a huge gap.
The problem is there's not enough Gen Xers to backfill those positions.
And nobody knows how to hire and certainly nobody knows how to retain the millennials.
Our back door is wide open.
We have to be honest with ourselves.
We have folks retiring and leaving the industry.
The good news is our front door is wide open too.
Unfortunately, no one's coming through it.
Which means that we, every year that goes by, because we don't have training programs, because we're so thin on budgets, we can't over hire and do shoulder to shoulder training.
The candidate pool is shrinking for the banking industry every single year, and as of right now, I'm not seeing any good solutions.
I was having a call with a client the other day and they were describing to me what was important and what they were looking for, and they asked me such an interesting question.
She said, okay, you know what I need?
Is that talent even available?
And in response, I had to stop and really think about what she was asking, and my response was this, and I believe it to be true.
It's not so much, is it available?
I think we can find skills to make it work.
The question is, is the talent obtainable?
Do people like that exist?
Yeah, I think they absolutely do exist.
Our challenge is can we recruit them to come work for us?
That's the real question.
And with a shrinking talent supply, the recruiting process is just that.
It's a recruiting process and it's getting tougher and tougher.
So what's the solution?
Honestly, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I know it won't be easy.
I know it won't be cheap.
We don't have all the answers, but we have a few and sometimes we can help, but we're not miracle workers.