Nordic Investment Bank
The Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) was founded in Nordic and Baltic countries with the headquarters in Helsinki, Finland. The international financial institution offers a long list of services from corporate bankings, retail banking, long-term loans to asset management.
NIB includes corporate and sovereign loans, loans to municipalities, loans to public-private partnerships, loan programmes, investments in labeled bonds, project & structured finance and lending outside the member countries.
In Southeast Asia, the bank often finances government projects related to infrastructure and environment.
The Brief
NIB's office in Thailand was going through a period of growth driven by a number of factors including a sharp increase in M&A activity, winning the deal to finance the upgrade of Prachuap Port in Southern Thailand, and losing a number of junior candidates to Private Equity firms. We were tasked with the goal of finding 6 analyst candidates to bolster the junior ranks. Salaries ranged between 25,000 baht and 35,000 baht, depending on teams and projects.
Our Method
The deadline was quite tight but fortunately, we could access our vast network in Thailand to quickly come up with a list of potential candidates for interview. The interview process was an initial soft meeting (2×30 mins), a second round of 3×30 min technical interviews with a 60 min case study, then a final round of 2×30 mins with Managing Directors.
To ensure our assessments were correct, we took these steps:
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Constantly communicated with hiring managers to let them know we only provided candidates with the profile, and to understand the necessity of the role and the company business.
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Research and created a list of competitor banks where we could headhunt the most suitable and brightest candidates.
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Had meetings with all the candidates before the interviews.
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Let the candidates know about the profiles of everyone involved in the interview, and fully debrief them the minute their meetings were completed.
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Studied the candidates’ work and prepared them for the technical question to ensure they could complete the assessment.
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Made sure that financial and timing expectations were managed at every stage.
The Result
We received 4 offers for the 6 open positions, and all were accepted within 4 weeks of engagement. The client was happy and later requested us to work on Associate and VP level hires.
