PLATFORM:MY VERY first posting within the financial services sector wasn't to the coal-face of lending, borrowing or foreign exchange, but to the recruitment section of the Central Bank, writes SHEILA O'FLANAGAN
Back then, in common with many State organisations, recruitment to the general ranks was by open competition, which meant the applicant had to undergo an aptitude test to see if they had what it took to guard the national finances.
Everyone who reached the basic educational requirement was invited to take the test, although I often wondered why we asked those who couldn’t actually fill in the form properly.
Having a fistful of qualifications is all very well, but forgetting to put your address in the space provided smacks of a certain inadequacy in the details department. An inadequacy which, perhaps, came back to haunt the organisation.
In those days, the bank didn’t recruit from within the industry itself. An ex-colleague (now also an ex-central banker) was once offered the opportunity to spend a few months on secondment with a commercial bank but was refused.
He always felt that it was because the bank didn’t want its rarefied atmosphere polluted by the stench of crass commercialism.
Now, however, and somewhat after the horses have bolted and cantered around the meadows a few times, the Central Bank is advertising for “experts” in a whole heap of areas. The bank promises applicants a career “at the centre of the financial services industry” which, at the moment, is like offering them a job in the bowels of hell; but I guess it’s better than being one of the 400,000 without a job at all.
The minimum requirement for the raft of expertise needed by the bank in disciplines such as credit, treasury, risk management and capital requirements, is a third-level degree, professional qualification and/or three years relevant professional experience. Personally, I’d go for the professional experience every time (and probably more than three years of it if you want a real expert), but my own working experience has shown me that big organisations are regularly seduced by glittering qualifications over practical spade-work.
I would, however, remind my ex-employer, and indeed anyone else looking to recruit from an ever-expanding pool of would-be highly-educated employees in these straitened times (times which might have been less straitened if the bank had employed the experts a bit sooner) that Myron Scholes and Robert C Merton – who ran the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund before it blew $4.6 billion in four months and then collapsed – shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997. Which proves that a towering intellect does not necessarily prevent you getting practical matters hopelessly wrong.
Scholes and Merton had no need to embroider their qualifications when they went job hunting, but recent articles on the subject have claimed that the number of adults who lie on their CVs could be as high as one in three. This is usually done by exaggerating educational qualifications or career histories.
In the days when I was rounding up the Central Bank applications, most of them were from students who had just completed their Leaving and so there wasn’t much room for educational exaggeration. When it came to the part-time jobs that were included as career history, the candidates were disarmingly frank. People who had done a little office work simply called themselves “filing clerks” not “data storage executives” while those who were working in hotel kitchens “did dishwashing” rather than being involved in “utensil sanitation”. It wasn’t until a few years later that everyone’s job descriptions were suddenly upgraded with glitzy, yet meaningless, titles.
We seem to have a need, as employers and employees, to make ourselves sound cleverer, more qualified and grander than we are. But the truth of the matter is that what we call ourselves doesn’t actually change the nature of what we do. By calling the new positions within the organisation “experts”, the Central Bank is clearly trying to set the bar at a certain level. But it will still be inundated by CVs from people who’ve sat at desks in a bank and spent the day checking their Facebook pages or spread-betting indexes. (Actually, the betting industry would be an excellent place from which to recruit experts in financial management. Most of them have a very healthy understanding of risk management.) I wish the Central Bank well in its search for a phalange of expertise to help it, us and the banking system out from the cloud that now envelops us. We need it.
Finally, this is my last column for The Irish Times. I'd like to thank all of you who've e-mailed me over the past 12 years with your comments and thoughts. Sharing your expertise has been fun!
www.sheilaoflanagan.net
