There’s a conversation that happens in financial services talent teams more often than anyone admits.
“We can’t compete with the fintechs.”
“They’ve got the brand. They’ve got the perks. They’ve got the cool office and the ping-pong table.”
“We’re a 30-year-old insurance company. We were never going to win that fight.”
The general assumption, therefore, is that the reason you’re struggling to fill your contact centre is because nobody wants to work for you because your brand isn’t exciting enough.
Or, perhaps it’s because the candidates are all chasing the shiny logo and the “startup vibes”.
But that’s not what our data says.
Brand came fifth. (That’s last, by the way).
When we surveyed over 100 contact centre professionals and asked what they check before applying for a role, brand recognition came fifth. That was behind salary transparency (64%), the job ad itself (61%), company values (60%), and employee reviews on platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed (55%).
Brand and company size? Just 36%.
Almost twice as many candidates care about whether you’re upfront about pay than whether they’ve heard of you.
But here’s the part that should really make you pause – when we asked people to describe their favourite contact centre role, zero respondents mentioned brand. Not one.
They talked about their team, their manager, and things like feeling supported.
The “we can’t compete with cool brands” narrative isn’t just unhelpful. In most cases, it’s wrong.
The battle for financial services contact centre recruitment isn’t being won on brand recognition; it’s being won on substance.
Here’s what’s happening before a candidate even applies to your role. They’re reading your job ad – properly. They’re Googling you. They’re checking Glassdoor, Indeed reviews, maybe Reddit. They’re texting someone who works there, or who used to.
They’re not researching you the way a customer would.
They don’t care about your product pages or that fancy award win. They’re trying to figure out one thing: what’s it like to work here?
And if the answer they find is silence – no reviews, a generic job ad, a careers page that hasn’t been updated since 2021 – that’s a red flag. Candidates don’t assume silence means “fine.” They assume it means “hiding something.”
The good news? You don’t need a household name to solve this. You need presence. Honest reviews from real employees. Better job ads that sound like they were written by a person, not a policy document. A careers page that tells candidates what to expect, not just what you expect from them.
Your job ad is doing more heavy lifting than your brand
66% of people who said the job ad matters to them don’t prioritise brand at all. Two thirds of the people making decisions based on your job ad don’t really care whether you’re a household name.
Which means your job ad isn’t a supporting document. It’s the main event and it’s the first real impression someone gets of what it’s like to work for you.
If it’s vague about pay, people move on. If it’s packed with jargon they don’t recognise, they scroll past. If it reads like it was written by committee and signed off by compliance, they’ll assume the culture feels the same way.
But if it’s honest? For example if it says “here’s what the job involves, here’s what we’ll pay you, here’s what the team is like”- that speaks far louder.
You have things the fintechs don’t. Stability, for one.
Our research found that every single person who said their primary motivation was “stable employment” stayed for over a year. 67% are still in their current role. These aren’t the flashiest candidates, but they’re the ones who stay..
Financial services can offer that stability in a way a two-year-old startup with runway concerns probably can’t. If that’s part of your story, say it. In the job ad, on your careers page, and in the interview.
Then there’s flexibility. The long-stayers in our survey were overwhelmingly hybrid or remote workers. 86% of people who’d stayed two years or more weren’t office-based five days a week. If you can offer hybrid working, lead with it. It’s not a perk.
And onboarding. Rushed onboarding leads to 2.5 times more early attrition. If you’re investing in getting people ready before they go live, that’s a genuine differentiator. Most candidates won’t know to ask about it, but the ones who’ve been burned before will notice when you mention it.
(Learn more about how to break the endless hiring cycle in financial services for more insights.)
Financial services contact centre recruitment doesn’t need a rebrand – it needs a re-think about what you’re leading with.
The companies winning the hiring race aren’t the ones with the coolest name. They’re the ones being upfront about pay, realistic about the role, and authentic about what it’s like to work there. That’s a competition you can win.
You don’t need a bigger brand. You need a better story and the honesty to tell it.
This article draws on findings from The Great Contact Centre Survey: research into what contact centre workers wish employers knew about attracting, hiring, and keeping the right people. Read the full report to see what else the data revealed.
