Even though it’s a newer product in the big picture of the CRM space, nCino's adoption has been massive over the last ten or so years, and it's 46% Growth Year-on-Year in 2022 only highlights the continued interest. Empiric’s US team runs this market full time and knows the lion's share of talent in this space – whether it’s contract or perm roles, we’ve seen the supply vs demand gap only appear to be widening, and finding and retaining qualified nCino professionals is a challenge for many banks and credit unions across the USA.
The nCino talent market is very slim and competitive. There are only about 7,000-8,000 candidates in the United States who can administer, develop, or architect the nCino loan origination system (LOS) solution, and many Financial Service Institutions are not well equipped to manage LOS after they disengage with an nCino Professional Services or another implementation partner. To compound this, there are only 12 nCino consulting partners, meaning not a lot of choice in who companies can partner with to implement and maintain nCino in their tech stack. Unlike other Salesforce products like Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, or CPQ, nCino is only used by the Banking and Financial Services industry, which means that those not working in that vertical would have no exposure to the product.
The impact of not having the nCino LOS solution up and running can be devastating for businesses, potentially facing the accumulated cost of maintaining a poorly designed or outdated system (technical debt), longer loan origination times, lower customer satisfaction, and missed sales opportunities.
As senior recruiters for banks and credit unions, we tackle the challenge of finding local talent for our clients. This challenge becomes especially difficult when our clients are located in remote or rural areas with fewer and less diverse qualified candidates.
According to a recent report, there are about 1,750 banks and credit unions in the world that use nCino. Most of them are in the US. Most of these financial institutions are local and value community-driven ideals. They want their employees to be part of the community they serve, and many have policies that require it. However, this creates a problem for remote-first candidates who may have the skills and experience that these banks and credit unions need, but not the location. Many of these organizations also expect full-time employees to work in the office and are hesitant to offer flexible or remote work options. Since there is such a small community of people who know how to work on nCino, community and regional banks that service less populated areas in the US have a much smaller pool of people to pull from.
The higher salaries nCino and Salesforce specific talent demand present many problems for internal talent acquisition teams. For example, a Salesforce Developer with 5 years of experience generally commands a salary of around $100,000. However, in the nCino space, where nCino/Salesforce Developers generally expect $130,000. Not understanding the nuances of how specialized nCino development knowledge is, internal talent acquisition teams often price themselves out of the competitive market. nCino’s Admin and managed services is another solution, but this generally comes with a large sticker price, versus utilizing in-house resources for administration, whether that be contractor based, or with a Full-Time Admin.
But don’t worry, there are solutions that can help you overcome these challenges. In this article, I will share with you three effective strategies that can help you find and retain nCino talent for your bank or credit union.
Effective Strategies to Find and Retain nCino Talent
There are numerous ways to solve the nCino talent gap, and I’ve highlighted the key ones below.
Full-Time Finance hires
If you want to hire people full-time, you need to understand the candidate community and your company’s footprint and proximity to highly populated metropolitan areas. If you’re located in New York, Charlotte, Austin, or San Francisco, you’ll have an easier time finding local talent.
But if you’re a community bank based in the Mid-West, you’ll need to be more flexible around remote work. Getting people to relocate from a large city, for less pay, is going to be difficult. You need to match market rate on salary and allow employees to work in a fully remote capacity if you want to be successful in attracting and retaining talent.
Contract
While contractors are great for things like implementations, upgrades, and big fixes, they’re also serviceable for a few other problems that come up frequently in the nCino talent market. If your company has a strict policy surrounding full-time employees needing to be in the office or living inside of your company’s footprint, then contractors are a great solution.
In addition, contractors are also a much cheaper option than utilizing nCino’s Admin and managed services for the platform’s administration. Instead of getting a consultant who is spread across two to three different banks, you get a dedicated resource, for a fraction of the cost.
Our Empiric model enables us to provide nCino contractor roles that can help you implement, fix, or optimize your systems and simultaneously train up your team on-site, if you are unable to find anyone in the local community. We’ve found that this is cheaper than hiring a dedicated person at a higher cost because nCino candidates are generally more expensive. Therefore, finding someone who is a Salesforce candidate and training them up is a more cost-effective solution. Our dedicated desk is well positioned to implement and advise you on that solution.
nCino University
nCino University is an online learning platform that offers courses and certifications on various aspects of nCino. Investing in a nCino trainer or training one of your existing employees to become nCino certified via this route results in an in-house resource who can help others learn and master nCino.
Conclusion
Finding and retaining nCino talent is tough for banks and credit unions across the US, due to the huge demand, small supply, local preferences, and high salary expectations. However, there are solutions that can help you overcome this challenge. You can offer competitive pay and remote work options to attract and keep full-time talent, use contractors for more flexibility, or train your staff in-house to become nCino experts.
Our dedicated US-based nCino team specializes in full-time and contract hiring, partnering with companies globally to fill even the most niche and advanced roles. We are well placed and available to advise and help here, whatever your goal and growth ambition is. Through our many years of experience, we’re more than familiar with the importance of cultural as well as technical fit.
Learn more about Empiric's nCino capabilities on our dedicated Salesforce page and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below. Also be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn.
