How to find your high potentials and talents in the future

After the crisis, the financial industry lives in different realities. While corporate communications suggest trust, credibility and sustainability, in fact more and more companies are losing these attributes and hiding behind zero differentiation. This is a problem for communication in general, but especially for employer branding. How do you win the competition for the best young talent, the talents and high potentials of tomorrow?

Employer branding campaigns in particular need to be authentic, relevant and differentiating. Above all, the financial sector, whose image continues to be tarnished, needs an excellently trained and highly sensitive new generation of employees in order to firmly re-establish values and professional ethics for itself and its customers. But how can this be achieved in view of demographic change and the appearance of Generation Y, with its new self-image and its new demands? How do you find the young talent and high potentials of tomorrow in the war for talent? How do you address them, how can they be activated and involved? For this new challenge, Herrwerth + Partner has developed not only a strategy but also the Employer Value Profile (EVP®) tool to ensure sustainable employee development.

Trust. Safety. Credibility. Three buzzwords that have always dominated the financial services sector. Before the banking crisis, they were firmly associated with seemingly unshakeable values for the customer. A bank was perse trustworthy, a financial service provider offered safe products, private equity and venture capital lived on credibility. It took an earthquake of massive proportions to bring these values crashing down. Its shockwaves were felt around the world, and the cleanup continues. And that on all levels. The Allensbach Occupational Prestige Scale 2013 provides an example of this. In the regularly conducted representative survey, the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research determines the reputation of certain professions among the population.

At rock bottom: the reputation of the financial industry

The result is sobering from the perspective of the financial world: bankers rank last in the short report published on August 20, 2013! Behind politicians and booksellers (see Fig. 1). Bankers thus find themselves on a par with television presenters.