Eoin Laird: The People @ Finance

How would you summarize the company journey so far in one sentence?

Fun, challenging and beyond our greatest expectations.

What are you most proud of?

I am proud of a lot of things. That we are one of Sweden’s fastest growing recruitment companies. That we have placed more than 800 people into new jobs from our two brands – Finance Recruitment and Talent Recruitment. I am proud every time we get recommended to a new client or candidate, which is quite often.

But what I am most proud of is the talent we’ve been able to assemble in our business. The overall quality of the people we have been able to attract and retain is the thing I’m most proud of.

Which is the best decision you’ve made as a business so far?

Going back to the beginning, the best decision without question is that there were four of us from day one. We were a team of four people who had worked together previously, we knew of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and we knew that we worked well together. Starting Finance Recruitment together, as a team, is one of the main reasons why we’ve been as successful as we have been.

Strength in numbers has been our biggest advantage.

Also, our specialist approach. Focusing only on recruitment and interim solutions within Finance & Accounting and Banking and Financial Services has allowed us to become true specialists in what we do.

Is there anything you think you could have done different during these five years?

That’s a tough question. We’re on a great journey and there are of course things we could have done differently in retrospect. We started to work with a company called Great Place to Work one year ago, and that’s an initiative I believe we could have benefitted from starting earlier.

Can you elaborate?

Since we started the business in 2014, we wanted to create an environment which is the best place to work for a recruitment consultant. If you’re active in recruitment in Stockholm, we want you to want to work here. I believe that engaging with initiatives such as A Great Place to Work earlier would have given us a better understanding of what really makes a workplace a great place to work. Understanding that, and actively working with it sooner may have meant that we could have grown even quicker than we have.

As a recruitment consultant, what is the most important value one has to learn to be successful in this business?

You need to have many skills to be a good recruitment consultant but one very important value is resilience, the ability to pick yourself back up from the ground when you’ve faced disappointment or difficulty.

The reason for that is because recruitment is about people, and it can be a challenging job. You have quite often extremely high demands and expectations from your clients and you are dealing with a pool of people or candidates whose expectations change or personal circumstances change during a recruitment process.

You’re operating in a market with fierce competition and a massive fight for the top talent. So getting a candidate through a process from A-Z and landing that candidate for your client is never an easy thing. You need to be able to handle setbacks and unexpected turns along that journey while at all times remaining focused on delivering beyond your clients’ expectations.

What will Finance Recruitment look like in five years?

First of all, we have two visions that we are continuously working towards:

To be the best place for recruitment consultants to work in Stockholm
To be the place where candidates turn to when they want to change job within our specialist areas.

In five years’, we want to be considered those two things. Categorically. As a matter of fact. When you ask a recruitment consultant where they would like to work, and that place would be the pinnacle of their career in recruitment, we want that answer to be Finance Recruitment.

It’s a big goal. But we dream big and work hard to get there.

We’ve always believed that by doing the best job we possibly can and by attracting and retaining the best people, the business will continue to grow. So, growth in itself has never been a focus, rather the focus is on the people within the business and the value we deliver to clients and candidates.

Is there anything that you have learned about yourself that you didn’t know before you started Finance Recruitment?

Lots – for example I have discovered an appreciation for Karaoke 😊

If you’d like to contact Eoin regarding recruitment within Banking & Financial services, or if you have other queries, please use the contact details below.