BANKS TURN TO
MIND READING TO SOURCE TOP TECH GRADUATES
|
W
|
ant to work at a
bank? First you have to let them read your mind.
At career fairs and
on university campuses as part of its graduate hiring scheme, Royal
Bank of Scotland Group Plc has been attaching
sensors to the heads of potential candidates, to measure brain activity and
attention spans.
Students are played a
series of images and videos for a few minutes while being
monitored. Depending on how they react, they’re presented with a
description of their personality type, followed by an area of the bank’s
business they might be suited to.
“We are using
gamification and online simulation" to create experiences for graduates to
be assessed from, RBS Chief Information Officer Patrick Eltridge
said in an interview, “but also give them valuable feedback.”
Tech Battle
Banks face an
unprecedented demand to hire talented technology employees, due to the
increasing need-for-speed from institutional trading to mobile banking, the
changing demographic of their customers, and the growing cyber-threat from
state-funded hackers to rogue teenagers.
But to convince
graduates that working for a bank might be better than joining a startup,
lenders are keen to show new hires they are technology companies first, and
banks second.
Deutsche Bank AG
has doubled the size of its technology graduate pool over the past two years.
“The majority of the technology graduates we want to bring in are people with a
focus on software engineering,” said Scott Marcar, Deutsche Bank’s IT boss in
London.
JPMorgan Chase &
Co. last year began ramping up the number of technology staff it was hiring.
The U.S. lender already spends $9 billion a year on technology, a budget
covering developer salaries to cybersecurity, with roughly a third targeted at
new investments. Bank of America Corp. has an annual budget of $3 billion for
new technology projects.
Despite the financial
firepower from the banking sector, there is stiff competition for those with a technology background. Facebook Inc., Google and Snap Inc. recently announced plans to increase hiring in
London, and food-delivery
company Deliveroo is considering doubling its 150-strong workforce in its
London-headquarters, looking for data scientists and machine learning experts,
according to a person close to the situation.
“There’s definitely a
challenge in the sector that’s born out of historical reputation and some of
the legacy impact from the global financial crisis,” said Paul Aldrich, head of
financial services technology at search firm Odgers Berndtson.
It’s not just new
tech firms that are looking to poach talent. New banking startups are also
competing for young programmers.
“We tend to find it
easier to attract and retain people than the bigger banks,” said Tom Blomfield,
a 31-year technologist who secured a license from the Bank of England for Monzo
Bank Ltd. earlier this year.
“People want to work on really hard problems from scratch with other talented
people, rather than be small fish in a big pond, maintaining software that’s
been there for 30 years.”
Monzo also publishes
its technical plans on the internet, which leads to developers seeking to join
the firm. READ MORE
Comments