If your fintech has turnover above 20%, this playbook is for you.
38% annual turnover means more than 1 in 3 employees leaving every year. In a fintech with ~200 people, that translates to roughly $1.7M in replacement costs — and a technical team that never fully consolidates.
We see this pattern consistently in LATAM fintechs. And the cause is almost never compensation or career growth: it’s cultural misalignment. Companies hire well technically, but poorly culturally.
The typical hiring process evaluates culture fit in 30 minutes with generic questions. No structure, no data, no way to compare candidates objectively.
Here’s exactly how to fix it.
Step 1 — Diagnose your real culture (Month 1)
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Before touching the hiring process, you need to understand what cultural profile actually works at your company.
What to do: assess your current employees with an OCEAN+ assessment. Top performers will share a distinctive pattern that probably no one has explicitly defined yet.
This is the typical profile we see in high-performance fintechs:
| Dimension | Ideal Range | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Openness | 75-88 | Fintech innovation |
| Conscientiousness | 78-90 | Regulation, compliance |
| Extraversion | 55-72 | Collaborative but focused |
| Agreeableness | 62-78 | Direct feedback culture |
| Emotional Stability | 72-88 | Growth pressure |
| Structure & Rhythm | 75-85 | Cross-functional collaboration |
Employees who leave before 12 months typically show significantly different scores. Once you see the data, the problem becomes clear: it’s not your culture — it’s your selection process.
Step 2 — Redesign the funnel (Months 2-3)
The most important change: the assessment goes before the technical interview, not after.
| Step | Traditional Process | Optimized Process |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | CV Screen | CV Screen |
| 2 | Tech Interview x2 | OCEAN+ Assessment (45 min) |
| 3 | HR Interview (30 min) | Tech Interview x2 (only if fit >70%) |
| 4 | Offer | Cultural Deep Dive (60 min structured) |
| 5 | — | Offer |
The threshold: candidates with a fit below 70% don’t advance to the technical stage. The HR interview shifts from 30 generic minutes to 60 structured minutes — with questions derived directly from the assessment.
Why before the technical? Because roughly half of candidates who pass CV screening don’t pass the assessment. That’s dozens of hours of technical interviews that simply don’t need to happen.
Step 3 — Train your team (Months 2-3)
The tool alone isn’t enough. You need to:
- Train your hiring managers on interpreting OCEAN profiles
- Create role-specific scorecards
- Define the ideal profile for each position with data, not intuition
This is where most implementations fall short. An assessment without a team that knows how to interpret it is just another spreadsheet.
Step 4 — Implement and measure (Months 4-12)
With the new process in place, the pattern we see in fintechs that complete the full cycle is consistent: early turnover drops, time to full productivity shortens, and hiring managers report greater confidence in their decisions.
The most visible shifts appear around the 6-month mark, when the filtered pipeline begins producing hires with stronger cultural alignment. By 12 months, the difference in retention and new-hire performance is measurable in internal data.
The ROI
The return model is straightforward: every avoided early departure saves 50%–200% of the role’s annual salary. For a fintech replacing roles at $40–80K, even a moderate reduction in early exits covers the platform cost many times over.
What we learned working through this with clients
1. The initial diagnosis is not optional. Assessing the current team before changing the process gives you the real cultural profile — not the aspirational one. Without this step, you optimize for the wrong profile.
2. Assessment before technical saves hours. Every candidate who doesn’t pass the assessment is a technical interview that doesn’t happen. Multiply that across 50 open roles a year.
3. Data wins internal arguments. When Engineering asks for “exceptions” for candidates with low fit but high skill, having concrete data shifts the conversation from opinion vs. opinion to what the data actually predicts.
4. Training matters as much as the tool. Hiring managers need training to interpret profiles and ask effective follow-up questions. We include this in every implementation.
Implement this at your fintech
If your turnover is above 20%, you have an undiagnosed culture fit problem. And every month that passes costs you.
We help you implement this playbook in 3-6 months:
- Current culture diagnosis
- Role-by-role profile configuration
- Hiring manager training
- Impact metrics tracking
Schedule a demo and transform your team next quarter.
After stopping turnover: growing the team
Lowering turnover stabilizes the team. The next step is developing it. The same psychometric foundation used in hiring runs Talento Index across the current headcount: mapping people into archetypes, spotting who’s ready to grow, and guiding internal mobility with data instead of intuition.
It’s the full cycle: you hire better, stabilize the team, and then make it evolve — all with the same OCEAN+ assessment.
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