FinTech’s hiring problem isn’t what you think.

Everyone in FinTech is talking about the talent shortage. Too few engineers. Not enough compliance specialists. A shrinking pool of people who understand both financial regulation and modern product development. The problem, we’re told, is supply.

We’ve been recruiting FinTech talent for years. And we’d like to offer a different diagnosis: the problem isn’t supply. It’s clarity. Most FinTechs don’t have a talent problem. They have a decision-making problem.

One profile, unlimited candidates, no decision.

Here’s a pattern we see constantly. A company comes to us with a role to fill. One role, one brief. So far so good. Then the ask comes: “Can you send us a range of profiles so we can get a better sense of what’s out there?”

On the surface, that sounds reasonable. In practice, it means the company hasn’t actually figured out what they need. They’re using the recruitment process as a discovery exercise asking us to send a parade of candidates so that eventually, somewhere in the comparison, clarity will emerge.

It doesn’t work like that. Not for candidates, who deserve a process that respects their time. Not for the hiring company, who ends up in endless rounds of “just one more profile.” And not for us and that is why we push back.

We recently had this exact situation with a fast-scaling client. They wanted volume. We declined, delivered one candidate based on a precise read of what they actually needed, and it worked. Speed and quality aren’t in tension when you know what you’re looking for.

This isn’t a junior problem.

You might assume this happens with less experienced hiring managers who are still learning the ropes. Sometimes. But we see it at the most senior levels too , COOs who keep requesting additional profiles to “compare better,” leadership teams that cycle through candidates for months without pulling the trigger.

The issue isn’t inexperience with recruitment. It’s that the organization hasn’t done the internal work of agreeing what success looks like in this role. When that conversation hasn’t happened, no number of candidate profiles will force it. You just get more rounds, more comparison, and more delay.

Then comes the AI brief.

The newer version of this problem involves AI. Companies that can’t define what they need internally are now turning to AI tools to write the job description for them. Which sounds efficient , until you think about what the AI is actually doing.

An AI tool is only as good as the brief you give it. If you don’t know whether you need a product-minded compliance lead or a compliance-minded product manager, your AI prompt will reflect that ambiguity. What comes back will be a well-formatted, confident-sounding description of a person who doesn’t quite exist , or exists in such a rare form that you’ll be searching for eighteen months.

Worse, once a role description is on paper , even an AI-generated one, it takes on a strange authority. People defend it. Candidates get screened against it. And the underlying confusion gets buried under a veneer of process.

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you cannot be critical of what your AI tool gives back. You have no benchmark. You’re just outsourcing the confusion.

The other half of the problem: hiring for a world that won’t exist.

There’s a second, related issue that we don’t hear discussed enough. Companies aren’t just unclear on who they need today. They’re hiring as if the next ten years will look like the last ten. They’re building teams for a stable future in an industry that is anything but.

From where we sit, a number of the roles being hired for aggressively right now will look very different , or may not exist in their current form, within three to five years. AI isn’t just changing what FinTech products do; it’s reshaping what the teams building and running those products need to look like.

That doesn’t mean you stop hiring. It means the profile you’re hiring for needs to be built around adaptability, not just current-state expertise. The best candidates in fast-moving spaces aren’t the ones who have done exactly this job before. They’re the ones who can evolve as the job evolves.

Most job descriptions don’t reflect this. They’re written to find someone who fits the current org chart perfectly , which is precisely the wrong way to hire for an industry that rewrites the org chart every eighteen months.

So what does good FinTech hiring actually look like?

It starts before you talk to a recruiter. The internal conversation , asking what problem are we actually solving with this hire and what does success look like in twelve months, has to happen first. Not as part of the process. Before the process.

If there’s genuine disagreement internally about what the role should be, that’s worth surfacing and resolving before a single CV lands in your inbox. A misaligned hire is expensive. A prolonged search driven by internal confusion is even more expensive , in time, in opportunity cost, and in the impression it leaves on candidates who are watching the process unfold.

The FinTechs that hire well tend to share one trait: they come to the table with conviction. They know what they need, they know what they’re willing to flex on, and they can make a decision when the right person is in front of them. That’s not arrogance, it’s preparation.

The talent is out there. The shortage is real in certain specialisms, but it’s far smaller than the clarity gap that surrounds it.

Global Fintech Talent places specialist talent across payments, embedded finance, digital assets, and compliance. We work with a focused network , which means we move fast when our clients know what they need.