Financial services firms might be increasingly losing out on the best and brightest new technology talent to new media and tech start-up companies, but they’re still targeting the same elite band of schools.
Wall Street & Technology polled executives working in capital markets on their favored universities to recruit IT talent. The list is doubly interesting because of its candor – most recruiters in financial services profess a lack of preference to any particular schools or degrees when hiring graduates.
In no particular order, here are the five preferred schools:
Brown University, Rice University, Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University were also highlighted.
Respondents to WS&T spoke of “communication skills,” “influence management” and even the ability to be “humble.”
As Ian Scott, IT manager, fixed income at BNP Paribas, told us: “A successful IT professional will be self-motivated, organized and thorough, possessing strong analytical and logical skills. They will want to learn and be able to apply experiences to their work. They will be innovative but cost-aware, autonomous but collaborative: somebody that we can easily work alongside.”
In other words, despite the gravitation of tech talent away from the financial sector, banks still expect a lot from their potential recruits.
