How financial services organizations can unlock business impact through employee experience

Over the past few years, organizations across industries have started focusing on employee experience as a crucial factor for talent success. For financial institutions, the need is acute, as their unfilled positions, inadequate onboarding procedures, and high employee attrition rates are the worst across industries which add up to 20 percent lower revenues and lost opportunity according to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report.

To address this issue, we investigated the employee experience in financial services, with the goal to provide an intuitive and relevant experience for both employees and employers enabled by technology every step of the way. Our research uncovered three key opportunities to optimize the employee experience in financial services.

Targeted approach to recruiting

Today, disjointed recruiting experiences are leading to record job openings. Shockingly, 49 percent of financial services job offers are declined due to a poor recruitment experience, leading to a 40 percent YoY increase in unfilled positions, according to the US Bureau of Labor Stats. This puts extra pressure on current employees, decreasing job satisfaction and productivity.

Streamline your organization's recruitment efforts:

1. Align messaging & data to be candidate-focused. Oftentimes, data is not leveraged consistently during the recruitment process, leading to poor candidate sourcing and mismatched messaging to candidates in the funnel. To fix this, organizations should establish shared workflows to identify skill gaps and create key personas and messaging guidelines for recruiting while establishing essential recruitment KPIs.
2. Ensure proactive outreach. GenAI enables marketers and HR professionals to rapidly deliver a high volume of personalized content across channels and generate actionable segments. This broadens an organization’s reach, leading to greater brand awareness and more candidates.
3. Guide candidates through the recruitment journey. Poor communication during recruitment leads to lengthy and disconnected processes. To improve communication, organizations should lean on automation and build workflows for key stakeholders that handle updates, reminders, and task assignments. These capabilities improve speed-to-hire and increase the number of qualified candidates in the pipeline.

Enabling a tailored hiring and onboarding experience

A poor onboarding experience drives 45 percent lower employee retention and reduces the productivity of remaining employees by 41 percent, directly affecting business value. Compared to other industries, financial services employees are the most likely to quit within the first three months of joining a new organization, making this issue even more pressing. With poor onboarding, new hires can feel disoriented, undertrained, and ultimately lose trust in the organization.

Follow these recommendations to deliver best-in-class hiring & onboarding.

1. Digitize & automate the offer experience. Many organizations still rely on manual, paper-based processes to disseminate offers (e.g., physical documents, tedious approval chains, etc.). To improve, organizations should take advantage of digital forms and signatures to simplify data capture, simplify forms though pre-fill, speed up offer completion, and ensure a consistent experience for all new hires.
2. Accelerate start to work with dynamic onboarding. Today, onboarding often feels standardized and impersonal, causing organizations to lose the confidence of their new hires. Personalizing the onboarding experience can solve this by making employee-specific critical information easily accessible and guiding employees through a dynamic onboarding experience to get up to speed faster. Implementing personalized onboarding results in a 70 percent productivity increase.

Targeted upskilling and surfacing new opportunities to retain high-quality talent

According to a PwC study, the financial services industry is 20 percent less effective at reducing skill gaps than all other industries, leading to higher employee turnover rates. With no clear career progression path, employees start looking elsewhere for growth opportunities. According to a McKinsey survey with data from 2020-2022, 41 percent of employees cited a lack of career development and advancement as the primary reason for quitting, beating inadequate compensation.

Follow these recommendations to engage and support your employees, develop their skills, encourage growth, and foster internal mobility:

1. Foster connection via personalized intranet and communications. A centralized, personalized intranet helps employees connect with the right resources, saving them time and helping them feel informed. Whether an employee is trying to find their way around the office or understand a new policy, a centralized intranet is an elegant solution to streamline access to information.

2. Deliver personalized training to empower growth. Employees desire control over their careers, but employers often don’t deliver training and education that reflect their needs. To help them find content and training that progresses their careers, organizations are turning to e-learning managers that understand the employee's current job and career goals while recommending courses to bridge the gap, increasing employee satisfaction and retention.

3. Foster internal mobility to prepare the next generation of leadership. By digitizing the career planning workflow, employers can use journey orchestration to suggest relevant roles to the right employees and guide them through the hiring process with personalized content. A well-structured internal mobility process workflow helps retain top talent and gives them diverse and highly valuable experience across the company.

Treat your employees as you would your customers

Great organizations prioritize employee experience with as much care and attention as their customer experience. To drive increased revenue, productivity, and an improved customer experience, organizations must create an environment where employees are passionate about their work and fully embrace the culture, according to Gallup. As you strive to create a world-class employee experience for your organization, consider using these strategies and leveraging Adobe's suite of solutions.

Dive deeper into Adobe Learning Manager to learn how critical a high-quality learning management system to upskilling employees. See what our clients have done: Lifetime Fitness and Domino’s.

See how Adobe’s own implementation of a personalized intranet improved employee satisfaction.

Read about how Workfront can give valuable time back to employees by improving internal efficacies.