Hiring the best compliance professionals is essential for any business that wants to remain fully and actively compliant with industry regulations.

Compliance professionals are responsible for ensuring that a company’s policies and procedures adhere to applicable laws, regulations and standards, and ensure that the organisation is in compliance with internal controls and risk management processes. Finding professionals to manage the weighty responsibility of compliance is, however, not always an easy task.

This article will help you in the sometimes challenging task of finding and retaining the dream team for your compliance requirements, by looking into three particular elements:

  • How-to-advice on hiring the best compliance professionals.
  • Diversity and inclusion in compliance teams.
  • Building the best compensation, benefits and professional development package for your team.
  • compliance advice

How-to-advice on hiring the best compliance professionals

When hiring a compliance professional for your dream team, it’s important to look for someone who has experience in the field as well as an understanding of your specific industry. Here are some general tips on how to hire the best compliance professionals:

Define your needs: Before you start looking for candidates, take time to define what type of skills, qualifications and experience you need from a potential candidate.

Research potential candidates: Once you know what type of person you’re looking for, do some research into potential candidates by searching online job boards or networking sites like LinkedIn. Look at each candidate’s background information, education history and work experience to check suitability.

Conduct interviews: Once you have identified several potential candidates who meet your criteria, interview them to get a better sense of personality and capabilities before making a final hiring decision. Ask questions related to previous experience in similar roles and knowledge on relevant topics such as data privacy laws or anti-money laundering regulations, etc.

Check references: After conducting interviews, it is important to check references before making your final decision on whom to hire; this will give crucial further insight into how reliable candidates are likely to be within your organisation.

Make an offer and onboard the candidate: If/When you decide which candidate is most suitable, make them an offer outlining salary expectations, benefits package, etc. Once accepted, the onboarding process can begin immediately. A successful onboarding process will save time, money and valuable energy in the longer run.

By following these steps, businesses can find qualified individuals who possess both the technical knowledge and the interpersonal skills needed when dealing with different stakeholders involved in maintaining organisational compliance.

Diversity and inclusion in compliance teams

Developing effective diversity and inclusion policies and procedures within a firm is vital to attracting and maintaining higher quality talent to the compliance dream team you are building. More and more, employees are selecting employers that align with their own values and ethics. Companies are being evaluated not only on their environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals and inclusive hiring practices, but also on their ability to put diversity and inclusion measures into action.

Furthermore, compliance professionals seeking a career path with opportunities for growth, over the long term, will quickly notice if an organisation does not exhibit diversity and inclusivity at all levels. A homogenous group of individuals in leadership positions will be seen by potential employees as a barrier to their career advancement, and they will seek opportunities elsewhere that allow them to develop based on their skills, not on other features.

Neglecting to ensure diversity in knowledge and thought can also lead to business failure. Only by working with a diverse team with cultural expertise and by expanding recruitment efforts to include diverse intelligence can a company successfully develop exciting and game-changing policies and strategy.

Diversity is also an important strategy in terms of customers. When the compliance team is made up of a diverse group, there will be diverse outcomes, and this perfectly matches the diverse range of customers that the team will encounter. A firm with a diverse group of employees is better equipped not just at handling customer problems and issues in real time, but at being able to plan for their needs in the future, putting policies and procedures in place before issues come up so that they can be handled more effectively, and customers treated more fairly.

In terms of promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace, it is firstly important to create safe spaces for employees to share their personal experiences and challenges, as well as break down barriers that hinder open communication. Secondly, it is vital that senior management buy-into and support diversity and inclusion initiatives, as this is what drives real change and strength for your compliance dream team.

Build the best compensation, benefits and professional development package

Once you have completed all the hard work of building your dream team, they need to be retained, and this is where a competitive, comprehensive and developmental compensation package comes in.

Offer competitive compensation: Although it is not the only thing that matters, a competitive salary is still important for recruitment and retention. If you want to keep skilled workers, you must be prepared to pay them what they are worth. Benchmarking based on location, role and experience is the baseline for consideration, but also consider a diverse combination of compensation that can make a job more attractive in a broader sense.

Build a comprehensive employee benefits package: Creating a comprehensive benefits package is essential to retaining the best employees. Employee benefits are a great way to improve your employees’ health, well-being, job satisfaction and productivity. A benefit package that includes health and wellness, financial well-being, work-life balance, professional development, and diversity, equity and inclusion will do much to retain that dream team you have built.

Provide employee development opportunities: A lack of career development opportunities is probably the biggest reason why employees quit their jobs. If you want to retain your most valued employees, you must provide them with a clear path to future development. Each employee should have their own career development plan that is unique to their strengths and interests. It should:

  • Identify clear goals.
  • Offer training and other development opportunities.
  • Make effective use of a mentorship program
  • Offer stretch assignments to take staff beyond their comfort zone.
  • Provide opportunities and develop strategies to promote from within.

There are many other elements that could be considered in building and retaining your dream compliance team, but these three areas of effective hiring, diversity and inclusion, and great compensation should certainly form a very substantial part of your plan. It is important that you get them right, if you are to have a compliance dream team that is truly first class.