June 2023 - Uncover Recruitment

The Legal sphere is a lucrative area for junior candidates. There are lots of opportunities to develop your career through a variety of pathways, including a role in the Legal Risk & Compliance sector. On Episode 5 of The Uncover Pod I spoke to Sebastien McGinty, the Head of Client Content & Financial Data at Floww, about his experiences of working in and learning from the space. Read on for his advice for other junior candidates.

What advice would you give to junior candidates aspiring to build a career in the Risk and Compliance field?

Figure out early what you want from these roles. In my experience, these are jobs where your personal investment of energy correlates directly to what you take away from them and also how happy you are in them. There is a spectrum of attitudes in this industry, which goes from people who really want this to be their career and want to strive in this one industry for a long time, to people on the other end who are just looking for something that pays the bills and allows them to do what they want to in their spare time. There’s nothing wrong with either of those attitudes, or anything in between, but it’s important to know where you are on that spectrum and what you want from your job.

The other advice I’d give to junior candidates is to be a team player. I don’t mean sacrificing yourself for the good of the firm – I mean finding a space where you’re reliable and you can rely on the people around you. That’s not a given, you have to forge that in any new setting.

The most valuable thing that these jobs can (and will) give you is knowledge and experience. They will contribute more to your professional life than just the take-home pay and day-to-day experience. I like to hire people who’ve worked in the service industry before because it teaches you to admit that you’re wrong or you don’t know something rather than pretend you do and get it wrong. It takes self confidence to ask a question again, but it’s an invaluable skill. I would counsel anyone who’s starting out to be open to that experience, to take those answers and learn as much as they can.

What are the top skills that junior candidates should focus on developing in the Risk & Compliance space?

The first quality you should cultivate is steadfastness. I don’t mean stubbornness – I mean being able to justify your decisions or opinions based on evidence and experience. You should be able to present yourself as an authoritative subject matter expert. You’re not always going to be right because we’re fallible and there are going to be new pieces of evidence that either circumvent or change your opinion. What you need to be able to do is have a discussion and either stick your ground or think ‘Is this actually right or does my ground need to move? And if so, should I change my opinion and the advice I’m giving?’ Too often I see young colleagues who are either too scared of losing face to change their mind or crumple as soon as a senior person criticises their opinion. That’s not something you can do if you want to build that trusted stakeholder position.

Secondly, you should follow your curiosity. The most impressive thing I see junior people in my team do is admit when they don’t know something. Lying and providing incorrect information just to save face does the team a huge disservice. Admitting you don’t know and having the willingness to learn demonstrates a huge amount of integrity.

Often people are unhappy in more junior roles because they don’t ask for things. Now, it’s your managers’ role to tell you what they expect of you, and if they don’t they’re letting you down. Equally, if you don’t explain to them what your ambitions are and what you want out of the role, they can’t give it to you.

My final skill would be sharing information and bouncing ideas off your colleagues. That’s why we work in teams. It helps you hone stuff and throw out what doesn’t work. It provides you contradictory opinions that help you find the right course of action. It really is important to cultivate positive relationships with your colleagues and people working within the wider field.

How can junior candidates stay up to date with evolving regulations and best practices in the Risk & Compliance space?

Any individual dictates their personal engagement in their professional life. Whether you’re reading around your subject. pushing for personal professional development opportunities, watching YouTube videos or TED Talks or listening to podcasts, consuming everything you can will be helpful. Unfortunately that will be unpaid work, but it will make you more capable and ultimately build that trusted stakeholder and advisor relationship.

It all depends how engaged you want to be. If you want to stand out as a candidate, learning everything you can will be immeasurably helpful. But, at the same time, you can’t be a master of every field. You’ll often work across different functions within a law firm or practice group. If you have a personal connection to something that transcends your professional world it is so valuable to your team to engage with material from it and go that extra mile. Find the heads of those practice groups and get into the meetings where they talk about sector strategy. That will provide many benefits to candidates in this field.

To hear the full conversation, tune into The Uncover Pod here.

What is the most important attribute that a candidate needs to demonstrate and why?

I’ll take enthusiasm and willingness to learn over nearly everything. They need to demonstrate recognition of what they do and don’t know, as well as a willingness to be honest about that. That’s something that I’ve seen make or break interviews. Candidates should be demonstrating a willingness to throw themselves into the role and ask ‘What am I going to learn today? How can I do better today?’

There aren’t many roles in compliance where you can do a straight nine to five type job with no thinking. To get the most out of the role, there has to be a willingness to push yourself and learn. There are some unrealistic expectations that when you have been somewhere for a year you automatically deserve a promotion. Leaders should be managing those expectations by asking ‘What does that look like? Do you just mean more money? Or do you mean a different role? And if so, how is that role different to what you’re doing at the moment?’ Promotions aren’t all about money, they’re about increasing your skills and knowledge.

What are the key mistakes you see candidates make during interviews?

Some things are universal, no matter what level the candidate is at. People often overestimate their abilities on their applications, so I want details. If you tell me you’ve been involved in something I’m going to want to know what you did. It comes across more obviously than people might expect when they overstate what they did. I’d take honesty in a response every time. That’s an absolutely critical mistake.

An important skill in this industry is the ability to communicate. We expect our writing and delivery to be succinct and to the point, but we often get candidates who try to impress us by talking for as long as possible. Don’t waffle – just get to the point, explain it and give a relevant example. That’s how you show confidence in your abilities and your skills.

Here are some other pointers:

Being too general in your answer is also a mistake. Give a specific example. Tell me what you learned from it, why you did it and what was useful. Data is a brilliant example.

Don’t give the answer you think we want to hear. Particularly when we’ve been interviewing for a while, we can tell when candidates do this.

‘I don’t know’ is always an acceptable answer. If we ask you technical questions, give us your best guess, but it’s okay to say you don’t know. Just be honest.

Should candidates be honest about what they’re looking for from a job?

Absolutely. When I ask about what you’re looking for, is it a title? Is it the money? Is it the opportunity to learn? For candidates who really want to learn, the progression might be slower on paper, because you’re not going to jump through four or five different levels in a short space of time, but the level of learning that you will get instead is massive. That’s an important point for many people – the expectation of quick progression might mean that you haven’t actually had the chance to build the thorough understanding that you would have if you’d stayed somewhere and absorbed information from senior people. Being honest in an interview helps us assess if we’re going to be able to meet your expectations, as well as the other way around.

What questions should candidates ask in interviews?

One of the questions I look forward to is ‘What does the training look like?’ Any firm whose training expectations finish at the end of the induction should be a bit of a worry for candidates. You need to ask ‘What does the ongoing, weekly, monthly or yearly training programme for the function look like, both in terms of professional skills and technical skills?’ This is a huge differentiation for the firm to offer people, and I think it’s a really important one.

To learn more about preparing for an interview, you can read this blog or listen to the full episode of The UNCOVER Pod here.