Strategy
11/08/2018

How Bananas and Tech Firms Can Help Tackle the Talent Challenge


management-11-8-18.pngAll bank executives and directors say that recruiting, retaining and properly incentivizing top talent is a priority, but it’s the banks that truly excel at this that are able to separate themselves on the competitive playing field.

How to tackle the talent challenge was the theme of Bank Director’s 2018 Bank Compensation and Talent Conference, hosted this week at the Four Seasons Resort and Club at Las Colinas in Dallas, Texas.

The first day of the conference laid the groundwork by introducing the conventional techniques used today by human resources professionals throughout the bank industry.

On Monday morning, before the formal beginning of the conference, attendees participated in a half-day workshop, presided over by a panel of experts from Compensation Advisory Partners and Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP. The topics covered a broad range of issues, from common executive compensation challenges, to strategies for promoting diversity and inclusion, to tools that can be used to properly align pay and performance.

The second day of the conference built on this, in part through a pair of audience surveys.

In one survey, nearly a third (31 percent) of attendees said managing rising compensation and benefit costs is their top compensation challenge for 2019, more than half (56 percent) said they’ve raised wages to better compete for talent and in response to last year’s tax cut, and nearly three-quarters (70 percent) said they’ve expanded their internal training programs to develop young leaders.

These statistics were borne out with anecdotes. Beth Bauman, the head of human resources at Bank of Butterfield, an $11 billion bank based in Bermuda, talked about implementing a talent management program to help guide and groom the bank’s younger employees. And human resources officers from Cadence Bancorporation and Union Bankshares discussed the challenges of merging compensation cultures after an acquisition.

The final day of the conference delved into less conventional approaches to talent management.

The day started with an anecdote from Bank Director’s CEO, Al Dominick, about an Asian grocery store chain that figured out a new way to sell bananas. Instead of selling them in traditional, equally ripe bunches, the chain sold bananas in packages of five, with each banana at a different stage of ripeness. As a result, the bananas ripen in stages over a period of a week, not all at the same time.

The anecdote illustrates how approaching an issue in a creative way can result in an unconventional yet effective solution.

The first presenter on stage on Wednesday, Jason Mars, came not from a bank, but rather from a fintech company. Mars is the founder and CEO of Clinc, a company focused on bridging the gap between research on conversational artificial intelligence and its application for enterprises.

My No. 1 criterion for hiring is intellectual curiosity, because that’s what drives people to do really hard stuff,” said Mars. This is more important to Mars than other, more orthodox measures, like a prospective employee’s college grade point average or even their performance in the interview process.

“Passion is another priority, and flexibility,” said Mars. “It’s about figuring out whether they will be motivated to do hard stuff because they’re passionate, curious and interested.”

And finishing out the conference was a panel of three bank CEOs from across the country, all of whom shared their respective talent and compensation strategies.

One of the more innovative philosophies came from John Holt, CEO NexBank, a rapidly growing bank based in Dallas.
A group of investors acquired control of the bank in 2004, when it had only $55 million in assets. Seven years later, a new management team was brought in to hasten its growth. One way it did so was to promise its employees a bonus equal to 100 percent of their base pay when the bank passed the $8-billion threshold, which it recently eclipsed. The strategy should serve as a retention policy as well, explained Holt, because the bonus pays out over 24 months.

NexBank also buys lunch for its employees every day, offering them a menu of multiple restaurants to order from. It pays 100 percent of their health insurance premiums. And it has added a millennial to its board of directors—the bank’s 37-year-old chief operating officer, now the CEO heir apparent.

The net result, said Holt, was the bank has fewer, better people than many of its competitors, and it faces little employee turnover, sidestepping a perennial problem in any industry.

The point is while there is no magic bullet that will solve all of a bank’s talent and compensation challenges, understanding the tried-and-true approaches to doing so, as well as the less conventional strategies used in the market today, will help banks better compete for the next generation of employees.

WRITTEN BY

John Maxfield

Freelancer

John Maxfield is a freelance writer for Bank Director magazine. He was previously the senior banking specialist at The Motley Fool. He regularly writes for Bank Director magazine and BankDirector.com. His work has been syndicated widely to national publications including USA Today, Time and Business Insider, and he’s been a regular guest on CNBC. John has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Lewis & Clark College and a juris doctorate from Southern Methodist University. He’s a licensed attorney in the State of Oregon.