Amid scandals, banks defy headlines to persist among top U.S. companies

Scandal. Fraud. ‘Villains.’

Studying the headlines, 2018 appeared to be a world of pain for several of the largest, most storied banks on Wall Street. Wells Fargo trudged through a second year of fallout from its fraudulent-accounts calamity, laying the conditions that likely precipitated CEO Tim Sloan’s exit last week. Goldman Sachs was rocked by revelations that it arranged financing for a Malaysian fund that misappropriated billions of dollars of the proceeds. Deutsche Bank, with a sizable U.S. presence, was battered repeatedly throughout multiple public crises.

“The bank could face a world in which it gets penalized out of existence,” David Zaring, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, even said recently of the 150-year-old Deutsche Bank.

With the industry facing an onslaught of public criticism, one might assume that the professionals who would otherwise analyze, counsel, and transact as bank employees would seek to take their talents elsewhere. LinkedIn data tell a different story.

The LinkedIn Top Companies 2019 list, a look at where U.S. workers want to work right now, features five banks among the ranking’s 50 businesses: Bank of America (No. 18), Goldman Sachs (No. 21), Citigroup (No. 22), Wells Fargo (No. 25), and JPMorgan Chase (No. 44). That’s up from four in 2018 and three in 2017, and while investment firms and insurers have starred in previous editions of the list, banks represent all of the financial services honorees in 2019.

The ranking, constructed using a methodology measuring interest in a company’s jobs and people as well as a company’s ability to retain employees, bucks the headlines about big banking institutions. The industry as a whole earned record profit of $237 billion in 2018, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a 44 percent jump from the previous year. And as they deploy new weapons in the talent war against the technology sector, banks remain glistening destinations for the best and brightest in finance.

“Headlines often get overblown and don’t reflect what’s happening inside the institution or in the day-to-day work,” says Heather Hammond, co-head of the global banking and markets practice at executive-search firm Russell Reynolds Associates. “The reality is that if somebody wants to learn finance and strategy, these banks are still the places to be trained and developed.”

Evaluating the risks

That’s not to say that job candidates don’t mind the headlines.

They’re asking more questions, seeking to meet more people from multiple different groups within a bank, speaking with clients of the bank, and even conferring with their current clients about the potential new employer, Hammond says. To her, the heightened diligence reflects a desire by candidates to more holistically assess the risk of joining a bank in today’s environment.

“They need to feel like they’ve met not one or two people, but they’ve met 10 people who help assuage their concerns about the potential risk of the organization,” she says.

While finance professionals view such diligence as a way of protecting themselves and potentially gaining leverage in negotiating the terms of their employment, the upside of day-to-day work in the industry is also growing. Among the more trumpeted changes are cultural: Weekend work has been curtailed, dress codes relaxed, and floor plans reworked to be more open and collaborative.

“They might appear to be small, incremental changes, but they reflect that culturally these firms are willing to evolve and embrace change,” says Deepali Vyas, global co-head of financial technology at the talent search and recruitment firm Korn Ferry.

Beyond the low-hanging fruit, the country’s biggest banks are boosting their attraction in deeper ways, according to Russell Reynolds’ Hammond, most notably by ramping up investment in training, development, and mentorship.

“We’re seeing more of an emphasis on sponsorship and mentorship,” says Hammond. “Senior professionals are owning the success of people coming into the banks more than before, when people were seen more as leverage.”

Tech roles soar

The makeup of the workforce in banking is changing even more rapidly. In a strategic bid to embrace digitalization, both for themselves as organizations as well as for their products and client services, the nation’s largest banks are hoovering up software engineers and application developers like never before.

At Goldman Sachs, the 10 fastest-growing skills listed by employees are computer science-related, according to LinkedIn Talent Insights data.* Of the bank’s workers who include skills on their LinkedIn profiles, one in 10 now lists the programming language Python, the data show. At Bank of America, economics ranks sixth among employees’ fastest-growing skills; the first five are programming languages. And at JPMorgan Chase, the quickest-growing job title is software engineer, according to the data.

“The numbers show that people want to learn tech, and you can’t avoid the numbers,” says Eyal Sharfertz, an MBA candidate at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, historically a paragon of financial theory education. Courses on coding, app development, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are now increasingly cropping up on the school’s class list, he says.

Read more: Finance is fighting back as most MBA grads today consider working in tech

Alongside efforts in the investment management industry, banks are also trying to elevate their appeal to women and workers of diverse backgrounds. Just last month, Goldman Sachs unveiled “aspirational goals” of having half of new analysts and entry-level associates hired in the U.S. be women, 14 percent Latino, and 11 percent black. Last year, Citigroup said half of analysts and associates hired globally would be women, and 30 percent in the U.S. would be black or Latino.

How successful the banks will be in broadening their appeal will take years to answer. In the meantime, against a backdrop of seemingly conflicting factors — record profits and mounting scandals — much of Wall Street is primarily fixated on another question: how much longer an expanding U.S. economy and rising markets can sustain.

But as long as the music is playing, professionals continue dancing their way into some of the biggest companies in the U.S. banking industry.

*Company insights were sourced from LinkedIn Talent Insights as of March 2019. Data reflect aggregated public member data from active LinkedIn profiles globally. Data include full-time employee profiles associated with the parent company and majority-owned subsidiaries.

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