Pieter de Kiewit
Owner / Senior Recruitment Consultant
Being treasury niche recruiters, our clients and candidates expect we have corporate treasury knowledge. Luckily we do. But there is more to the recruitment trade. Let me describe a brief client conversation we have often:
– Next to treasury skills we expect the candidate always to have the right personality
– Of course, you do, very important. What specifically do you look at?
– Uhm, communicative, proactive, and detail-oriented…..?
– Aha, and how do you measure if your candidate brings this?
-….
Making our conversations about personality more concrete is not only important for our client intakes, where the topic does not always get the attention it deserves. Of course, the opinion of the client about the candidate is essential but also vice versa. We should be able to inform candidates about what personality is required in order to assess the match.
Internally we started working with the Big5 typology to interview more structured, make better matches, record properly, and inform our colleagues about our conversations. When the candidate completes the Treasurer Test, we can compare our notes with the results. This way we train ourselves and become better matchmakers.
Big5 is one of the few statistically and scientifically sound typologies to describe personality traits. Both on our own website, as well as on that of the Treasurer Test you can read about why we are positive. Statements about tested candidates are not “good, worse, or better”, they are about aspects like openness to new developments, extroversions, and conscientiousness. To make this more tangible, the last aspect includes, for example, the trait “detail-oriented”. In our perception, this one is essential in many corporate treasury positions.
We will ask for your support in due time for the following. Many Big5 assessments measure over 50 personality traits. Learning about and working with each is too labour-intensive. With psychologists and within our team, we chose 16 we think are most relevant for the job of treasurer. Through online surveys, we will ask you to choose what you think is most important so we can measure and report on what is most relevant for you. It is an exciting topic, all about the quality of match-making and shaping the best team you can have. We hope you will join and complete the survey in due time.
Thank you
