How to become an Employer of Choice

In the short space of five years, Prospa has established itself as an industry disruptor and market leader in small business lending by putting its people at the heart of the business. It is this genuine commitment to the ongoing success of our people and customers that has allowed us to become market leaders and consistently deliver strong business results.

The correlation between employee engagement and business performance is well known, which is why we consider the development and execution of exceptional people practices as a critical component of achieving our ambitious goals. We were recently honoured with being awarded as a Best Employer in AON Best Employers Program 2017 and ‘Best Fintech Place to Work’ at the 2017 FINNIE Awards, which is a testament to the people, culture and leadership we have here at Prospa.

Creating a compelling employee experience

A core pillar of our people practice is having a dedicated resource fostering and overseeing our employee experience. Our employee experience is designed to ensure that it touches every point of our employee lifecycle with a concentration in engagement and feedback.

This is a strategic business decision that creates a competitive advantage in attracting talent and is critical for the long-term success of any organization. Our employee experience is designed to drive consistently high employee engagement, which in turn has resulted in great results and business outcomes.

Some of our initiatives include:

• Regular pulse survey which is designed to yield high-quality feedback from our employee base, allow for a targeted response to employee needs and ensure a transparent and coherent feedback loop between the leadership team and employees.
• A comprehensive onboarding and induction program to foster high engagement early in the employee life cycle.
• Seasonal engagement drives to keep morale high during our busiest periods, allowing employees to focus on their objectives while maintaining a positive and balanced outlook.
• The formation of an Employee Experience Committee, with members are drawn from across the company and rotated on a half-yearly basis to ensure a wide-range of perspectives are represented in the formulation and execution of our Employee Experience.

Building a robust recruitment culture

Due to our rapid growth, we are currently focused on creating a recruitment culture and cultivating a great candidate experience. We encourage all our employees to be talent scouts and we have a healthy employee referral program in place. The establishment of a robust and effective recruitment culture is a key element of our organisational strategy, to ensure we’re hiring employees that will thrive in our organisation and contribute to our vibrant culture. In practice, this requires building recruitment capability in our leadership team and encouraging broad ownership and accountability for the recruitment process. Our leaders work with the People & Culture team to ensure great hiring decisions are made.

Our cloud-based applicant tracking system optimises the recruitment process from an internal and external perspective, allowing us to conduct effective interviews and make data-driven hiring decisions. The tool has built in scorecards and interview kits, and all employees have access to the system so they can track their own referrals.

Visionary leadership, passionate workforce

These people practices are leader led and drive alignment across the organisation through well-articulated, cascading organisational objectives. This approach has created high performing teams and a culture that encourages thinking differently and provides our people the opportunity to bring their ideas and shared experience to their roles with a goal of creating great customer outcomes.

By recruiting for shared values and weaving these through our employee experience delivery, we tap into a common passion and genuine commitment to our small business customers. Maintaining the connection between vision and execution is a priority for our leadership team, so we focus on delivering clear internal communication to ensure that our employees understand the impact of their work on our wider organisational goals.

The focus on People at Prospa has allowed us to rapidly scale-up from a start up to a medium-sized business in under five years. Our team has grown 180% in one year, from just 48 employees in 2016 to the diverse team of 140 people from 33 countries that we employ today.