If you have ever managed positions that require FINRA licenses, then you know how important it is to balance the need for candidates to pass their FINRA exams along with demonstrating the right job skills. The challenge hiring managers and recruiters continue to face is finding individuals who are not just great test takers but people who bring a passion and skills to the position AND can pass the exams.
When hiring for positions that require FINRA licenses it is important that you weigh the two factors equally, this means both the ability to pass the FINRA exams and perform the core skills of the job. The job skills are a must and the ability for them to pass the FINRA exams is just as important. The question then becomes, how do you know if they possess both abilities before the offer is made?
1. Job Skills:
One of the most popular ways to validate job skills is using behavioral interviewing techniques. The ability to ask a candidate how they tackled previous experiences and closely listening to their answer offers an understanding of how they will act in the future. Some of the core tenants of behavioral interviewing is to identify the core competencies for which you are hiring. Once you have four to five core competencies identified, you will want to build consistent questions around them. There are many resources that can help you build your list of competencies and interview questions. Some of these can be found via Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM.org), and Association of Talent Development (TD.org).
During the interview, the way you ask the question is important. You want to give the candidate permission to answer with real examples not just something they read in a book. To do this, it’s important to set up the question appropriately. For Example, when you as the interviewer ask a candidate how they have dealt with a difficult customer in the past you will want to frame it to show that you understand the challenges and it is okay not to be perfect so the candidate can share real experiences. I have used, “Working in a Customer focused role, I think all of us have had to deal with a difficult client, I know I have had a few. Please share with me a time when you had a difficult customer and walk me through what steps you took to help them.”
Give the candidate time to think of a specific example. Allowing for silence is okay. If they start saying, “I would”, or “you should” it indicates that they might not have real-life experience. If you hear those words, stop, and ask them for a specific example. By learning about how they approached real-life experiences, you can understand how they will work in the future. You can also ask follow-up questions around the specific example and ask them what they learned from the event. This offers you a perspective on how they engage in learning from experiences and if they have a growth mindset. It is important to make certain you stick with the same questions for all candidates for a particular role so that you are comparing each candidate consistently against the job skills required. You can also ask behavioral interview questions around time management and stress management. Both time and stress management impact a candidate’s ability to study for and pass the exams.
To validate a candidate’s skills, you can follow up with their references and ask them questions about how the candidate managed specific situations in prior roles. The similar stories and approaches described by both the candidate and reference validates the behavior and skills.
2. Propensity to Pass the FINRA Exams:
The candidate’s ability to pass the FINRA SIE and top off exam is the other half of the equation. Identifying a candidate’s propensity to pass the exams can be challenging but not impossible. Relying on simply asking each candidate “Are you going to pass?” is not a great help. If you set up a consistent method to measure a candidate’s reading comprehension, study skills, critical thinking skills, and time management skills you will have stronger pass rates. By implementing pre-employment assessments that gauge critical thinking and reading comprehension you can take a lot of the guess work out of the process. There are several providers of these assessments including LIMRA (LIMRA.org) and SHRM (SHRM.org). Just like the consistency in interview questions, it is extremely important to use the exact same questions, assessments, and targets across all candidates to drive the reliability of the data. One mistake that we have seen is when organizations tend to make exceptions based on gut vs. data. Education is also a factor in the ability to pass the exams. We have found in our research that if they are currently in college or have recently graduated, they have built some solid study skills and have a 45% higher chance of passing the exams.
By equally weighting both job skills and assessing candidates’ ability to pass the FINRA exams, you will find you are spending a bit more time up front in recruiting candidates, but you will reduce the continuous attrition due to low pass rates. This will have an overall positive impact on your recruiting costs in the long run.