Natalia Brauze represents FxPro – a world leading forex brokerage company based in Cyprus. It has a long established reputation and licensed for providing services by such regulators as FCA (UK) and CySEC (Cyprus). Moreover, beside providing high standard to clients all over the world, FxPro care much about its employees offering a stunning corporate culture. If you are a football or Formula 1 fan, then this is your dream company to work for. Natalia Brauze from HR department was kind enough to answer our questions.
How would you describe the job market in Cyprus (in the industry you work)?
The forex labor market is still growing. Many new companies appear, leaders on the market easily move to the category “ex-”, changes burst into business of regular players daily. And the market is very responsive to constantly modified frames of work. It is full of job opportunities, so candidates can often choose the best option. Unfortunately, many companies being unprofessional reduce the quality of human resources provided. Also, the industry gets an awful lot of bad press. Candidates drift from one company to the other or even leave this market. Because they wish to find something more “reliable” and less demanding. Perhaps, from this perspective the competition between companies is one of the toughest than anywhere else.
Moreover, forex companies are struggling not only for candidates from the same industry (as it is a rare case when we hire non-profile/inexperienced candidates). But we compete with IT companies that is in most cases even more difficult. The artificial inflation of the market affects both companies and candidates. Companies suffer from too high candidates’ expectations, both for salaries and corporate benefits offered. Becoming more and more demanding, spreading dissatisfaction and neglecting their loyalty towards a company. Candidates, in its turn, happen to be lost in this variety of options, fake ones as well.
What are the most requested specialists and the ones in short supply in your industry?
The most frequent request we have is from our customer relations team which is very multi-national. As long as we provide a high-quality service, we recruit only native speakers. It is connected with well-known difficulties of search and relocation.
As soon as we are a FinTech company, IT professionals are another popular category to recruit.
Any difficulties you meet during the recruiting process?
It is the fact that recruitment for a big company working in a fast-pacing environment has its difficulties. The typical ones for all the recruitment and particular – for the industry we work in.
I would stress few of them that affect the hiring process to a greater extend:
Dominance of money motivation rather than professional interest and career ambitions.
Unfortunately, it is a common tendency of modern market when candidates are looking for high salaries. This constant pursuit for money often stops professional growth. Candidates jump from one company to another. Usually, without gaining good and enough experience and improving their qualification. Such mass behavior also bursts the market artificially. The companies raise their salary budget unreasonably and not rarely with no capacity to pay salaries. It creates an illusion for the rest that they are low paid, and everything starts from the beginning.
Relocation that is really time consuming both for the company and future employees, highly expensive and thus implies many risks for the company.
Mostly it is even more about psychological aspect of relocation for the candidates than anything else. Not everybody is ready to accept the offer for relocation although s/he was looking for it deliberately. The worst-case scenario is when a candidate refuses to join us at the very last minute when it is time to go to the airport.
Narrow niche of some candidates’ categories in the market.
It is not only difficult to find a proper candidate who is willing to join the company and relocate to Cyprus. But to satisfy his professional and salary expectations. The markets really differ in this sense. So we have to motivate candidates with other benefits:
- projects to run and participate in
- both unique and universally applicable experience they can gain
- employment benefits together with free lunches
- a gym with a personal trainer
- special discount scheme.
Are the candidates based in Cyprus enough to fill your positions or you need to hunt abroad?
The specific of the business doesn’t allow us to source all the candidates in Cyprus. Moreover, we are looking for professionals almost all over the planet. This strategy has made our team professionally strong and particular one because multicultural environment enriches and drives you grow.
How should CVs look like to get your attention?
Good quality CVs are always well structured, give rather many details, but still leave some room for questions during the interview. It’s always good to see some subjective/objective estimation in figures/achievements or any other way as the result of a candidate’s previous experience. A resume shouldn’t look like a book for kids, it’s more important to make it easily readable.
What are the main qualities you want to see in your candidates?
We would like to see candidates who are passionate about what they do, who are hungry for professional development, who is proactive, dynamic and have a high level of stress resistance. As a big company and leading brand we invite to our team those professionals who have long-lasting plans and see our cooperation mutually awarding. That’s why we are looking for candidates with high level of emotional intellect.
What kind of interview do you prefer: simple dialogue, professional tests, or stress interview?
It depends a lot on the position and who runs an interview as well. For many positions we use tests and “home tasks”, especially for IT, Back Office and Marketing Department. It is the demand of a right choice because the price of a mistake can cost us a fortune.
I would like to think that a “simple dialogue” should not be applicable to us as soon as a hiring interview is a tool for professional appraisal, not for something else. And not only HR professionals but hiring managers should get a training in order to conduct an interview in an effective manner. That is something we tirelessly work on.
As for stress interview it seems to be really weird that it is widely discussed nowadays. The methodology of it is really complicated and only professionals can deal with it without negative consequences for candidates and company’s reputation.
What is the funniest story you had with a candidate?
Recruitment is about much stress, but about a lot of fun as well. The last story we had was as follows. We were headhunting a candidate for our Marketing Department. We managed to make him interested in the position but obviously, not enough as soon as he sent us his CV in Russian. In reply to our request to provide us with his CV in English he seriously asked: “You can’t use google translator?” It was the most embarrassing answer from the candidate of this level. Of course, it was “no” for him from our side. In a couple of months, he sent us his application in English like we never talked about the position before. People will never cease to amaze.
Natalia Brauze,
HR FxPro
Feel free to check the information about the company news and open vacancies.
Follow Cyprus Job Market on Facebook or in LinkedIn.
