Wall Street is turning to behavioural profiling to select graduates, as banks hope to widen the range of colleges they hire from and reduce the number of recruits who quit to join hedge funds.
Deutsche Bank this month introduced a screening system for some US graduates, designed by a Silicon Valley firm that works with Airbnb and LinkedIn. Amid a scramble to find talent from non-traditional backgrounds, Citigroup is also testing behavioural profiling across its US investment bank and Goldman Sachs is piloting its own version.
Deutsche now requires candidates applying for US corporate finance roles to complete a 20-minute behavioural test designed by Koru. Their results are compared with an ideal profile based on the test results of the bank’s best performing junior staff. Koru can also set the results of Deutsche’s top juniors against a database of about 30,000 students who applied to other companies. Most are from colleges where banks do not typically recruit.