The best digital hire in banking isn't always the best digital talent

I started at Ariad five years ago as a Business Development Representative. Banking and insurance were handed to me as a sector. I'll be honest, I didn't do much with it at first. It felt opaque, slow, and frankly a little intimidating compared to the faster-moving worlds of agencies or scale-ups.

Five years later, I help shape digital teams at some of the biggest financial institutions in Belgium. UX researchers, service designers, content strategists, marketing automation specialists. And the single most important thing I've learned is this: placing great digital talent in a bank is not the same as placing great digital talent.

The difference isn't about finding better people. It's about understanding the environment they are walking into and knowing whether they can make their work happen inside it.

1. Don't hire against the job description. Hire against the environment

Why?

• A bank asking for a UX designer may actually have a service design problem
• A team asking for a content strategist may really need someone who can create governance across five business units. 

The title on the brief tells you the skill. The organisational challenge tells you the profile.

This is the shift that changes everything and it's the one most hiring conversations never make.

In a scale-up, seniority often means autonomy. In a bank, seniority increasingly means influence: knowing who needs to be involved, when to involve them, and how to move a decision through the organisation without lowering the quality of the work. Those are completely different capabilities, and they don't always live in the same person.

At Ariad, we've learned to assess banking talent on two axes: craft and organisational impact. Can they do excellent work? And can they make that work happen inside a complex organisation? In financial services, you need both. One without the other is a placement that looks good for three months and then quietly unravels.

"The work was strong. The portfolio was strong. But very quickly we realised this person didn't understand what it meant to be inside our organisation. It wasn't about the design skills, it was about the judgment. Knowing what you say to whom, and when. That's not something you see in an interview."

- UX lead, Belgian financial institution

We have seen this pattern more than once. Candidate, client, and everyone in between excited about a placement. Genuine enthusiasm. Strong start. And then, five or six months in, it unravels. Not because the work was bad, but because the person could not read the room. The pace mismatch was too big. The stakeholder management, which is a discipline in itself, not a soft skill, was not there.

In banking, I would take the designer who can get Legal, Compliance, Product and Marketing behind a good decision over the designer with the most beautiful portfolio. The work only creates value if it gets through the organisation.

The candidate who walks into an interview asking "How quickly can I ship?" and the candidate who asks "Who owns the final decision?" are telling you very different things about how they will perform inside a bank. Both questions are legitimate. Only one signals that they understand the environment they're entering.

2 .The brief is never the whole story

In most sectors, a job brief is a starting point. In banking and insurance, it's almost a decoy.

When a hiring manager sends a UX researcher brief, they're describing the role as they understand it today, based on what they think they need, filtered through what they're allowed to ask for, shaped by internal dynamics they won't mention on a first call. What they actually need is often something slightly different, sometimes something much more nuanced.

Early in my career, I would fill briefs. Now I interrogate them. Not aggressively, but with genuine curiosity:

• What's the team dynamic right now? 
• Is the project genuinely greenfield or is there a legacy system that will quietly kill any ambition on day one? 
• Is the brief asking for a designer when the real problem is a governance gap nobody has named yet?

The managers who consistently get the best talent from the market are the ones who brief with honesty and precision. They know what they want, they say it clearly, and they don't change their minds every six weeks. That clarity is a magnet for strong profiles. When the brief shifts monthly, the best candidates sense instability and quietly step back. You end up with whoever is still available, not whoever is best.

If five agencies all say yes to your brief without pushing back, you probably haven't learned anything from them.

3. Procurement is part of the relationship. Ignore it at your own risk

Most people think the hiring manager is the relationship. In banking and insurance, that's only part of the picture.

Procurement departments in large financial institutions are significant players, with their own frameworks, their own preferred supplier lists, their own contract timelines. They can slow down or stop a partnership that everyone else in the room wants to happen.

The partners who understand this sector learn to navigate it: knowing the procurement calendar, understanding which conversations need to happen at which level, building relationships that go beyond the hiring manager's team. It's less exciting than the talent conversation. It's also non-negotiable.
 

4. The relationship is built on honesty, not on telling you what you want to hear

This is perhaps the most counterintuitive thing I've learned over five years.

Early on, I thought the job was to always have a great candidate ready. To project confidence. To never admit a gap. That's not a partnership, that's a performance.

The managers I have the strongest relationships with today are the ones I've been honest with when it mattered. When the candidates in my pipeline aren't the right fit. When the market for a specific profile is tight and the timeline needs to adjust. When a brief, as written, will attract mediocre applications because it's positioned wrongly for what the candidate market actually values.

That honesty costs something in the short term. It occasionally loses a placement to someone who said yes faster. But it builds something a faster yes never can: a relationship where the manager knows that when I say someone is the right fit, I mean it, and where I get early visibility into headcount plans, budget cycles, and strategic priorities, because they want that conversation before the brief exists, not after it's been sent to ten people.

What this means if you are building a digital team in financial services

Start with the problem, not the job description.

• Map the environment before you map the profile. Who are the stakeholders this person needs to bring along? What does the decision-making process actually look like? What has made previous hires succeed or fail and how much of that was about skills versus organisational fit?
   
• Distinguish craft from organisational impact. The strongest portfolio isn't always the strongest hire. Ask your talent partner to assess both axes, and push back if they're only talking about one.
   
• Build the relationship before you need it. The digital leaders who move fastest when a critical role opens are the ones already in conversation with someone who understands their environment, not the ones sending a brief cold and expecting results in two weeks.
   

• Demand honesty. If every agency always has the perfect candidate and never pushes back on your brief, that's a signal. The best partnerships are the ones where both sides are willing to say the uncomfortable thing.

   

Five years ago, banking and insurance felt like the hard sector. Today it's the one I understand best, precisely because so few people take the time to understand what it actually requires.

The talent is out there. The question is never whether someone is good. It's whether they're right for your organisation and honest enough with each other to find out.