The leasing industry is one Oakland Partnership managing director Tom White knows well having begun his career with UK firm Anglo Leasing before founding recruitment firm Oakland Associates 22 years ago.
White used his industry experience and filled junior roles in the asset finance sector despite being a general recruiter, but clients’ preference for using specialist recruiters to find candidates for high-paying senior vacancies saw the company consolidate its leasing recruiting work with the formation of the Oakland Partnership in 2006, with Denise Lawlor, a fellow alumna of asset finance, brought into the team as director and shareholder.
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Being able to market a company with ring-fenced hiring for the leasing industry, made a "big difference" in terms of market perception, says White, and has helped with the firm’s growth since inception.
Today, by White’s estimation, the Partnership works with 60-70% of the major funders in the leasing world, including bank subsidiaries as well as major brokers.
The company also aims to use its relationship with Oakland Associates to offer its leasing clients a broader range of candidates, from fields such as marketing, HR and administrative support.
As a consequence the businesses can together offer to "recruit not just their technical roles, like credit analysts, sales and sales support people, asset managers, credit controllers and so on, but also if they want help with a marketing or HR role."
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By GlobalDataAlternative roles
The Partnership itself recruits across the board in leasing positions, from graduate entry-level to senior management roles, which benefited the company in the worst of the post-2008 downturn.
"During the financial crisis some positions became very scarce," explains White. "There was virtually no sales recruitment. There was very little recruitment for credit analysts because if a company wasn’t being offered any business, they didn’t need anybody to analyse it."
The Partnership was able to plug this gap, however, with a rise in extra credit control positions, litigation positions and asset management positions as companies tried to protect the back-end of their books, although White points out this did not make up for the shortfall entirely.
In comparison, recruiters who specialised in sales were not as flexible and able to turn to recruiting alternative roles, and therefore struggled, he says.
ING withdrawal
The recession also saw companies leaving the market, as the withdrawal of ING Lease from the UK in October 2012 attests. However, the departure of ING presented the Partnership with an opportunity as more than 150 highly-trained people immediately entered the job market. Within a few days of ING’s announcement, a number of other finance houses were giving presentations to its staff, looking to secure employees to expand into the void ING had left behind.
However, the timing "was a bit too soon; staff were reeling from what had happened", according to White and some employers rushed to entice ING staff to join them "without much forward planning".
However, several ING employees, despite the offer to join another finance house, chose instead to approach White’s team to explore what the rest of the market held.
"Many people at ING had been there 10 or 12 years, and were quite comfortable. It came as a huge shock. Some of them just didn’t know what to do."
Now, with the economy recovering, and motor finance doing especially well, the situation has reversed, and new players are entering the market, says White.
"The Partnership is working with several of the more entrepreneurial businesses, which are looking to enhance what was a small presence in leasing into a much bigger model," he says.
"But also there are some companies which haven’t been involved in it at all and which are now looking to come into it. We’re also doing some work with peer-to-peer and alternative lenders as well, who are starting to get into leasing and asset finance.
"I wouldn’t say we’re back to where we were in 2008," cautions White. "But it’s certainly the busiest it’s been for a few years."
White adds the recession has also resulted in a change of salary structure: "Sales roles, for example, might have paid a £40,000 base and a £40,000 commission, but are now maybe paying a £30,000 base and a £50,000 commission."
However, the end of the recession has signalled a return of sales jobs. According to White, some companies cut their sales staff by more than was needed at the lowest point of the crisis and some talented staff were let go.
"The recession hasn’t been as long or as deep as they thought," he explains. "Some of the vacancies we’re seeing now are positions made redundant a year or two ago, but they’re now struggling to get somebody of that calibre again."
This is partly because a lot of people have simply left the industry since the recession, says White, who cites the example of a former credit analyst he knows who is now a gardener for the parks department of his local authority.
"What happened in the recession was too bitter a pill" for some in the industry, he says and adds the demand now is for top-quality sales staff "who can generate revenue and profit", in a market with a surfeit of candidates.
"There are a lot of sales people in the market," he says. "But a lot of the ones who have been made redundant, and not been
re-employed, have not been re-employed for a reason."
Judged by industry roles, rather than individual competitive ability, White singles out the credit analyst as a position particularly in demand and experiencing a lack of quality applicants thanks to the contemporary use of credit scoring and automated systems by lenders who are no longer training individuals for such a position.
With roles outnumbering candidates, the credit analyst position has not only bucked the trend by maintaining salary levels, but actually increased in pay in several instances, and the Partnership has turned to applicants from New Zealand and Australia, where people are still "trained properly".
Fewer roles
At the other end of the spectrum, the Partnership has received plentiful applications in areas such as operations, project management and administrative roles. Unfortunately for these applicants, White reports "there aren’t many roles like that, and there are a lot of qualified people out there. And they’re a lot of what was let go."
One area the industry is struggling with is young applicants. From the applicant’s side, "the leasing industry isn’t an industry anybody ever leaves higher education wanting to go into", he says.
The problem of "fresh blood", as some in the industry have labelled it, has then been compounded by the unwillingness of clients of the Partnership to advertise to graduate recruiters or universities.
On top of which, most jobs, from fairly junior levels upward, often come with a demand for previous industry experience, making it "hard to get into the leasing industry even if you want to when you leave college or university.
"There are very few opportunities for graduates or youngsters to be trained in the sector."
The requirement for specific asset finance experience in even junior or graduate roles from a lot of clients is not always necessary, says White, and can be counterproductive.
He offers the example of a £22,000-a-year sales support role, for which clients will usually demand a year’s leasing experience.
However, White says, "for someone with experience of mortgages, it’s still instalment credit. "In reality there’s not much of a learning curve for somebody in that field at a junior level."
As a result, companies are missing out on the long-term benefit of recruiting the best talent, for the short-term gain of recruiting someone who doesn’t require a lot of training.
"Even then you often have to un-train them because if you took, for example, a sales person from a large wholesale lender and introduced them to a small brokerage, it’s a completely different culture anyway."
And White believes the situation is getting worse: "The perception is there are a lot of people in the market, and therefore it will be easy to get leasing experience. There is some truth in that, but it still doesn’t mean they’re the best people."
Instead, White believes "open-minded" employers gain long-term benefits from hiring "good-quality people" willing to work many years for companies which will invest in the early stages of a role.
For example, White says a company may interview two candidates, one is "bright and switched-on" with a background in mortgages, the other has 15 undistinguished years’ experience in leasing. The second candidate may more often be offered the job but the first one is "probably the better option" in the long run.
As a result, "you see the same names going round the industry, again. You get people who work for six or seven different leasing companies, but much less new blood coming in and getting their first shot."
Such a mentality created problems for employees during the recession, as "many stay in the industry their whole life but could broaden their experience much more.
"When the market went through a very difficult time, a lot of those guys found it hard, because they’d never done anything else."
However, White predicts the economy will continue to pick up, especially if interest rates stay low, "and it looks certain they will", encouraging more entrants into asset finance.
"We’re already aware of some more significant players looking quite closely at the market," he says. "We know some people with some well-established funders who are being approached about new ventures."
