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Are you an Octopod?
29 January 2010
by Veronica Somervaille

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The ideas and conclusions within these blogs are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Octopus. They are for general interest only and should not be taken as investment advice or as an invitation to purchase or sell any investment. For our full terms and conditions, please click here.

Are you an Octopod?

Veronica Somervaille - 29 January 2010

In last week's blog we talked about issues around the working life of advisers, and this week we thought we'd let you know about working at Octopus. At the beginning of the year, many people's thoughts are on work and career, and it's no different for us here. We're always looking for great people to join us and help us achieve our aims to deliver innovative products along with great customer service. In 2010, with new customers and new products, we're looking to fill positions across the company.

The talented people who love working for the Octopus are a very important part of our aims and the search is on for more of them! As a company we have strong values, from boldness, and delivery, to happiness and development. We want to be more than happy with the people we hire but, unusually for a City company, we'd also like them to be happy here. It's a simple formula: if we hire the best people, and create the best environment we can to fully engage them, then that will contribute to our staff delivering the best products and services to customers. In short, we're focused on building long term relationships with not only our customers but also our staff.

Octopus is one of the few companies that has continued expanding and recruiting throughout the recent economic upheavals, which is very much due to the work of our advisers and the trust of our investors, resulting in our customer base growing further.

We're continuing to work towards the Octopus dream of being a trusted, market leading investment company. We're expanding our relationship management teams, growing our marketing function and ensuring that we add resource to our operations and customer service teams to cope with the extra demand. We are looking for new people for our HR team and for finance professionals too.

So what is it like working at Octopus? It's a very busy environment and new staff will be joining a community of talented people who really care about what they do. We're looking for people who want to be part of that: ability is important, and so is a passion for customer service. Drive to be the very best is essential. Integrity and humility are fundamental.

As we're looking for outstanding people, we take great care over the recruitment process. We'll only hire someone if we're sure that they're going to be a huge success. This means that our recruitment process isn't easy - we use competency based interviews to ensure candidates match our values, as well as numerical reasoning tests and business case studies. We may also add in a practical exercise if it's relevant (writing tests for marketing, presentations for our relationship managers).

In some parts of the business, we really like to hire potential talent from other industries and develop them. That way we have fresh talent that is even more eager and determined to succeed. As financial services is notorious for poor customer service, we don't limit our recruitment drive to that pool of candidates! We also recognise the importance of personal referrals from our existing employees and industry contacts.

We're keen to hear from people who think they have the talent and ability to become part of Octopus, so please do get in touch with us at ktaylor@octopusinvestments.com. We've just hired some great new people on our Multi Manager team, and you can read about that here, and we'll keep everyone updated on new staff in the coming months.

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