LendInvest is a UK-based asset management platform for property finance. They provide specialist finance to property investors and developers, and opportunities for individuals, corporate institutions to invest in property-backed loans.
We caught up with Stephane Mehmet, Talent Acquisition Manager at LendInvest to find out about the problems LendInvest is solving, some top people and talent tips and why they chose Zinc as their background checking provider. Keep reading for some great tips on company culture!
We’re a non-bank property finance platform. We currently offer a range of short and long-term loan products: bridging loans, development loans, and buy to let loans. On the investment side of the business, we have an asset management platform that facilitates our investors from global banking partners, to institutional and individual investors, so we're a hybrid lender/asset management business.
I am the Talent Acquisition Manager here at LendInvest - I look after the talent function across the business, this includes tech and commercial. We’re currently at a headcount of around 200 people. The Talent team consists of one Talent Acquisition Partner and a People and Talent Assistant shared across the people and talent function. My role includes hiring, talent strategy and operations as well as other talent projects across the business.
I am involved in the hiring plan for the business and I am very engaged with key stakeholders and hiring managers, providing a streamlined hiring process across all functions, hiring training, upgrading of our careers site, and implementing a new background checking provider, Zinc!
Slack is great - it’s completely disrupted the old email back and forth. It's much more dynamic. You get a much faster response and I find it more collaborative since they've added new features like huddles, and integrations with google hangouts and google calendar. I'm getting less and less correspondence through email as a result. It’s quite easy to interact with more than one stakeholder at the same time and provide updates in a timely manner. It allows you to keep track of what you're doing by adding reminders and notifications.
We also use Workable. They’re one of the top ATS systems that I’ve used in terms of usability. It’s very easy for a business of our size to manage and keep track of the acquisitions we have. We’ve added a lot of automation to our hiring process that has been key to us being consistent and objective across our hiring, providing a superior customer journey for candidates.
Firstly, to be ready to join a business that is fast-paced. You need to be super organised and sharp in terms of how you prioritise your hires. You have to have excellent communication skills, sometimes over-communicating with stakeholders to make sure, especially in this remote world, that nothing gets lost in translation, there are clear instructions to work out your processes at each stage in the most minute detail.
It sounds silly to go into that much detail at the beginning but if you do it properly, you end up making sure you're covering many of the bases that you don't miss moving forward along the process. It's important to align the commercial interests of the business with your hiring plan and prioritize accordingly.
We have been hiring remotely and onboarding remotely for the past 20 months. As a business operate a more hybrid working model. There has been a shift in mindset in terms of onboarding and working remotely. The attention to detail becomes even more important when it comes to making sure new starters have the right equipment to start with within the right timelines, understand the agenda from a timeframe perspective, and to be clear and transparent with what they should expect when joining.
When you are onboarding and inducting candidates, going into more detail than you normally would do if they're in the office is even more essential, because of the fact that they're not getting to see the cultural environment in person. So there's more to do and more emphasis on understanding the culture of the business more deeply.
We mainly use LinkedIn as our key sourcing tool. We also have many referrals across the business, which has been a key driver in finding really strong hires for the business.
One of the key factors is transparency. We are very transparent internally about what the mission of the business is commercially, what our targets are, including what each individual team member needs to do to contribute to those goals. It's a very inclusive environment where people are collaborating seamlessly and feel like they're contributing to the overall goal of the business. Aligning everyone’s mentality is very key to maintaining a strong work culture.
We wanted to automate the process and take a lot of the administrative work away from us as people and talent team in order to free us up to do more strategic things within the business.
We spoke to a number of providers and I was sold on the product and liked that cutting edge tech Zinc was using. We tested the product first and it was very seamless. We had some really good experiences from our side but we’ve also asked the candidates what their experiences were and they felt the process was very seamless as well. So that gave us the confidence to bring Zinc on board permanently.
Zinc has been a huge time saver. Although I still go into each profile to make sure everything is there, the overall process has been relatively seamless and we’re saving a lot of time on administration by using Zinc so it’s something we’re looking to keep moving forward.
Check out LendInvest in the blog: Top 30 mission-driven Fintech companies to work for in 2021