Have formal qualifications had their day? | Recruiters Weekly News

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MI5 recruitment to keep an eye on budgets

If you were asked to create a new job by merging two existing positions, you would be hard pressed to find a more glamorous combination than ‘spy-plus-investment banker’. And yet, that is precisely the dream job that domestic intelligence chiefs at MI5 have created, as they work to manage resources and find efficiencies within their ever-tightening budgets.

The vacancy – for a finance officer based in Belfast – comes with a £46,860 remuneration package, and requires the successful candidate to liaise with the country’s banking and investment community, manage budgets, and ”generate innovative solutions” that will get the most out of available resources.

While the advert says that a talent for communicating complex information to colleagues and audiences is vital, an actual qualification in finance or economics is not a requirement – illustrating that, once again, it is a combination of specialist knowledge and soft skills which impress recruiters the most in the current jobs market.

Although the advert makes no promises of Q-branch gadgets or Aston Martins, the successful applicant can console themselves with the fact that this is a largely office-based position, and the life expectancy is therefore greatly improved over the Hollywood version of the secret agent…

Goldman Sachs re-evaluates its hiring priorities

Banking giant Goldman Sachs has announced it is to introduce a new component of its hiring process for its 2018 graduate intake: a personality test.

The new process will automatically match responses given by candidates, and compare them to answers provided by existing high fliers within the company. It is hoped that matching character traits will equal matching performances, too.

The move is the second change to Goldman’s recruitment process in recent years, as it aims to broaden the diversity of its talent pool. In 2016, the company scrapped its traditional first round processes, which targeted Ivy League students on college campuses.

Goldman’s head of global recruiting, Matt Jahansouz said “We’re shifting from a world where you just used to look at a GPA and resumé”.

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Australia prepares for digital future

We have seen several examples, over the past few months, of Australian recruiters matching the demands of the jobs market with some degree of success. But there is one area where the nation’s workforce may be facing tough challenges in the near future: and that is within its digital readiness schemes.

Fresh analysis into the digitisation of labour by tech consultants Ajilon has found that 91 per cent of IT professionals believe they will have to re-skill if their current position is to remain viable within a digitised workplace. Yet at the same time, the same study also concluded that one in four (25 per cent) of tech employers were failing to appreciate the scope of these short-term changes; were currently offering no upskilling programmes, or the ones they were providing were inadequate. Similarly, almost half (45 per cent) of the IT professionals surveyed stated that they were using their own time and money to re-skill themselves independently, in preparation for the digital transformation of work.