-- FINS goes straight to the source, questioning hiring professionals about new opportunities, compensation and the best ways for a candidate to land an offer --
Jeff Risinger, HR Chief of the SEC, said his charges are feeling beat up, but emboldened. The financial crisis is like their 9/11. They have to be stronger and smarter than ever -- the world depends on it.
The agency will also likely be bigger than ever, as it stands poised to do more hiring in the next few years than it has since Sarbanes-Oxley became law, when it deputized 850 people in 12 months.
Risinger recently sat down with FINS to discuss deputizing Wall Street's finest and other hiring strategies.
FINS: What kind of applicants are you looking for?
Jeff Risinger: We're looking for talent that perhaps is capacity talent on Wall Street -- people who really understand what's going on in the markets and why the markets may be doing what they're doing.
A lot of people come and stay for a career, but a lot don't and we realize that when they come. We are working very hard to make sure that when that knowledge comes in we extract and leverage it across the appropriate branches of the agency.
FINS: Have your approaches to finding and attracting talent changed at all in the past six months to a year?
Risinger: Well, people should look for us on Twitter. As soon as a job is posted, we send a Tweet; there's some 500-plus people following us on there. We have interns every summer and we told them: 'Go back to your career services office and look at every technique that's being used: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. We're trying to find every dynamic way we can to put out the word.
That said, all the traditional ways of getting high-quality candidates still work.
FINS: Is it really a 'buyer's market' out there so to speak?
Risinger: I would say that it is. We're seeing roughly a ten-fold increase in the number of applications we receive per position posted. And we're seeing incredibly talented people. It's certainly not a weak applicant pool. And we are a place where people can come to give back; that's important to a lot of people now.
I think there's a real sense that for the SEC, this is a critical time. I was at a conference a few weeks ago and I had someone tell me that the financial crisis is to the SEC what 9/11 was to the FBI. And I think there's some truth to that. It's a time to really improve what we do.
FINS: What can we expect to see in terms of traditional, full-time staff levels?
Risinger: We know looking to 2010 and 2011, we are going to see a steady increase in staff. Now, what scale we will see could vary widely. The chairman has been very vocal in the past few months about what she'd like to see and Congress is certainly having those discussions as they relate to the budget.
FINS: Do you have a number of different game-plans in your desk, depending on what gets approved?
Risinger: We're laying the groundwork now. Let's just say we're not going to be caught by surprise.
FINS: Is there anything in particular that you are looking for in people from Wall Street?
Risinger: We really look for traders that are active in financial markets. The market's not static, so it's important that the agency keeps circulating that fresh knowledge.
FINS: What about on the legal side? A lot of what you do is enforcement, is it a 'buyer's market' for lawyers?
Risinger: There's a lot of talent available, but there's not so many coming through the door that we can just grab the ones we want.
FINS: A lot of fingers have been pointed at the SEC in recent months, has anybody on staff been told to kind of move along as a result?
Risinger: With Madoff, the investigation is still very much underway; we're not going to do anything until all the details come out.
Look, the agency feels beat up right now -- obviously, how could we not? But the public service and importance of what we do hasn't changed at all. And you don't hear as often about our major victories, like the settlement we just won over auction-rate securities.
FINS: Anything else that you'd like to pass along to would-be applicants?
Risinger: The financial crisis itself shows how important a strong SEC is. And I'm convinced we'll be stronger than we've ever been because of the lessons learned in a situation like this.
There's nothing like this mission. It's something you don't find anywhere else. Where else do you come to work every day and realize that the job is so much bigger than yourself?