Underwriters

Underwriters are the lifeblood of any Mortgage function within Financial Services and an essential part of the Credit Risk apparatus. Hiring underwriters with the right knowledge, skills and experience is vital to the success of any lending organisation.

Kind Consultancy have a long working relationship with a large building society, who were experiencing an increase in applications and simultaneously launching multiple new products. To keep up with this escalating rate of activity, they were looking to hire 2 new permanent underwriters, and requested Kind’s assistance after failing to fill the positions on their own.

Kind Consultancy used a truly consultative approach, taking the job specification, learning how the need for these roles fit into wider business plans and discussing with the client where their own recruitment attempts had not been successful. The client had found that their rural location without good transport links had been a major hurdle for all of the most promising candidates they had previously had in process. The Kind team showed the client that if they allowed remote work, they could access higher quality candidates.

Kind selected a mix of candidates who were already known to them as part of their extensive database of Financial Services professionals, as well as newly sourced candidates who were actively seeking underwriting jobs. As the client continued to grow and experience a rise in customer interest, the initial request for 2 positions became an extended resourcing project, with Kind Consultancy acting as the client’s exclusive recruiter for all underwriting positions.

Across 6 months, Kind Consultancy successfully placed multiple Underwriters, Senior Underwriters and Manual Underwriters with the client, all in permanent positions, and continues to work with them on all underwriting talent needs.

Interim Deputy CRO

As a Chief Risk Officer (CRO) steers the big picture of Risk management for a Financial Services organisation, a Deputy CRO can be vital in a large business for supporting, embedding and enacting good Risk practices.

One of the largest groups of Financial Services Mortgage & Protection Networks in the UK contacted Kind Consultancy seeking an Interim Deputy Chief Risk Officer. The organisation had recently acquired a new company and needed extra specialist resource to support the CRO in managing the Enterprise Risk framework and function during the transitional period.

Kind Consultancy immediately contacted one of the Kind Agile Solutions bench of expert contractors who we knew had a substantial Risk history including specialist Enterprise Risk work within the mortgage sector. The candidate also had a track-record of successful framework design and had held a Deputy CRO position in the past, making us confident they could handle all aspects of the position. As a member of the KAS bench, the Kind team already knew that this person was currently available for work and had a familiarity with their professional history.

We connected the client to our selected contractor and within 2 weeks of taking the initial brief, the client made an offer, the candidate accepted and was at work the following week, with a total turnaround time of 3 weeks. The client has been very happy with the contractor’s work and has repeatedly extended their contract.

Prudential Risk & Credit Risk

Prudential Risk and Credit Risk are both specialised areas of Risk Management within Financial Services. Where Credit Risk professionals manage risks related to lending, ensuring the organisation is only providing loans to customers who will be able to repay them, Prudential Risk centres on the mitigation of risks that threaten a firm’s financial stability. These are closely linked types of risk, and in smaller organisations the same person will frequently hold responsibility for oversight of both.

A Building Society contacted Kind Consultancy looking to recruit a permanent Risk Manager who would be predominantly responsible for Prudential Risk and Credit Risk Management.

The client wanted to run the search as a retained project, because they had worked with Kind Consultancy on multiple retained projects for senior and specialist positions in the past and Kind had been successful in all of these previous assignments.

The Kind Consultancy team began by running a market mapping exercise, identifying passive candidates who were promising headhunting targets as well as looking at available active candidates who were a good fit and had proven expertise in both Prudential Risk and Credit Risk.

Utilising a combination of these methodologies, Kind built, pre-screened and interviewed a longlist of candidates, using their own initial interviews to narrow down the shortlist to 6 which was then submitted to the client, ensuring that all candidates shortlisted were a good fit for the role in skills and expertise and a good fit for the organisation in terms of culture and long-term career goals.

The Building Society interviewed 3 of the shortlisted Prudential Risk & Credit Risk candidates in-person and after the final interview, immediately selected one to hire. The client reported they were once again very happy with the retained search service and would continue to use Kind on a retained basis whenever a permanent recruitment need arises.

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