Any future college graduates who wish to To find a job at JPMorgan Chase you don’t have to worry about what they specialize in.
These instructions come directly from the company’s CEO, Jamie Dimon. IN interview earlier this week, Wall Street Journal Editor-in-chief Emma Tucker asked Dimon what a young person who wants to work at a $556 billion financial firm should learn.
“It’s almost not important to tell you the truth because you’re looking for smart, ethical, decent people,” Dimon responded.
While JPMorgan is taking a more holistic approach to campus hiring, it still favors those with finance backgrounds.
“I really think in business you have to learn the language of business, which is accounting—a little bit of basic business,” Dimon said. “I think it would help to get into accounting, finance, [or] markets. Something like that.”
The comments may come as a surprise to those expecting one of Wall Street’s most successful executives to say that aspiring bankers only need to study finance or math. But the emphasis on hiring diverse, yet experienced candidates for open positions is a growing trend. Companies are no longer looking only for a select group of potential employees. Opening up to candidates from different backgrounds can help employers support a wider range of candidates.
“We value and recognize that talent is not limited to any specific group and that diverse backgrounds, perspectives and backgrounds enrich our workforce and contribute to our collective success,” a JPM spokesperson said in an email. They also explained that the bank hires candidates from a variety of higher education backgrounds as it undertakes non-banking roles such as data science, marketing, HR and technology.
Rather than looking solely at a candidate’s specialty, JPMorgan prefers to look at cultural fit, according to the company’s HR director, Robin Leopold. JPMorgan recruiters use the following questions to evaluate candidates: “Will they fit on the team?” Leopold said on the LinkedIn Get Hired podcast. “How did they come to the interview? Were they ready? Were they curious? Do they represent our values?”
Although even something as intangible as cultural fit is scrutinized to ensure maximum fairness. In some corporate circles there is move away from simply asking if a person is a “culture fit” because it can reinforce unconscious bias by only hiring people who are similar to each other. Instead, there is a movement to evaluate whether a candidate can be additive to the company culture. Critics of hiring for culture fit alone believe it gives a static view of someone’s talents that doesn’t take into account whether they might succeed in a different work environment.
Hiring people from diverse backgrounds can also help increase the diversity of an organization. “[We] definitely think about it not just in terms of race and gender, we think of it as diversity of thought,” Leopold said.
To try to increase diversity, some companies have gone even further than Dimon suggested and dropped the college degree requirement altogether. Last year, Linkedin found that the number of jobs that don’t require a college degree increased by 90%. Some experts expect this trend to continue to spread and eventually become the norm. In the United States, 61% of high school graduates go on to college, according to October Labor Department data. But lately, a degree has ceased to be as reliable a way to get a job. In 2023, 70% of bachelor’s degree holders aged 20 to 29 were employed, up from 76.4% the year before.
The growing trend to remove education requirements from employment criteria has gained momentum during the labor market crisis caused by the pandemic. As companies desperately tried to fill open positions, they began looking in unusual places and changing their requirements. Some, including JPMorgan, have eliminated the need for bachelor degree when they realized that more than 60% of Americans do not have higher education. A company spokesman said 80% of the bank’s current vacancies for “experienced employees” do not require a college degree.
“Of course we go to campuses, but those are not the vast majority of places where we hire,” Leopold said during her podcast appearance. “We’ve really been able to identify talent in all areas and places, and I think that really makes us a stronger company.”
When it comes to education, Dimon has in the past called on colleges and educational institutions to prioritize getting students good jobs over graduation rates. “If you look at kids, they have to get an education to get a job,” Dimon said during an interview last month. “I think schools should be judged on whether kids were able to come out and get good jobs?”