With more than 4m customers and over £12bn in deposits, Starling is one of the UK’s best-known neobanks.
Since its founding in 2015 by banking veteran Anne Boden, the fintech’s employee numbers have jumped tenfold — from just under 300 full-time employees in 2018 to around 4,000 today. Starling’s head of talent acquisition, Charlotte Thomas, tells Sifted it has a “flexible” approach to hiring and values “potential, experience and values” over academic credentials.
The neobank has five offices across the UK and Ireland, including London, Manchester and Dublin. It’s also set to open physical premises in both Canada and the US in the coming year as it looks to take its software-as-a-service side hustle to the states.
Starling currently makes most of its money by banking retail customers and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the UK. In recent months, however, it’s pushed plans to sell its core banking software to finance firms worldwide — particularly in the US — via a subsidiary company called Engine. It’s currently hiring for over 60 roles, fourteen of which are related to Engine.
Sifted asked Thomas what Starling looks for in a prospective employee and what’s in store for candidates looking to join the neobank. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What kinds of qualifications do you look for in potential candidates?
We don’t target specific ones. For graduate hiring, we naturally tend to receive more applications from universities near our offices outside London — such as Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Southampton, and Cardiff University — but we look right across the country when we hire for roles.
We don’t look at grades for our experienced hires; for graduate hires, grades are considered but are not the deciding factor. For tech roles especially, we value industry experience, internships and personal projects such as GitHub portfolios just as highly as academic performance.
There’s also specific criteria for certain roles. For instance, in operations and risk, we place more emphasis on hands-on experience and attitude than formal qualifications and in banking, we look for candidates with strong sector experience, commercial acumen and emotional intelligence. And in some corporate roles, we require certain qualifications such as a qualification from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) for positions in the people function and a Post-Qualified Experience (PQE) for legal roles.
Starling also sponsors Code First Girls, a free 16-week coding programme for women and non-binary people. For the past three years, our tech department has hired graduate cohorts from the programme.
What’s the job interview process like?
The interview process typically consists of three stages, though this differs depending on which department or business. For Engine, it is a three-stage process where candidates meet three or four team members from both within and outside the team. This helps candidates gain a well-rounded view of the role, while we assess fit from multiple perspectives.
We hire a lot of technology roles in Engine, which can involve take-home technical assessments or systems design or in-depth technical interviews, depending on the role. These could involve take-home tasks, pair programming, live coding, or systems design interviews. We keep briefs broad to give candidates the freedom to approach tasks in their own way.
Roles in operations will typically involve a two- to three-stage process, starting with a recruiter interview followed by one or two team meetings. These often include competency-based tasks tailored to the role, which often involve practical tasks such as data analysis, letter writing or simulated customer interactions, like web chats or call activities.
In banking, risk and other corporate functions, it’ll be a three-stage process consisting of a 30-minute video interview with a talent partner, a competency-based interview with the hiring manager and a final in-person meeting with a director or executive. These don’t typically involve a task unless it’s a highly technical role.
What are the first few months like for a new hire?
New hires typically work closely with their manager to identify priority projects. In some cases, they may be recruited for a specific project from the outset. In tech roles, for instance, in the first few weeks and months, new hires focus on meeting team members and learning our ways of working. While the emphasis is on onboarding and exploration, those who progress quickly are encouraged to dive into hands-on work early.
We also offer area-specific training and mentoring schemes from day one to support ongoing career development. And depending on the role and function, new hires can rotate across teams to build a broader experience. For example, tech graduates rotate across teams in engineering, cyber and data during their graduate programme.
Are there any books, courses, podcasts or anything else you would recommend to candidates to help them prepare for interviews?
We don’t mandate specific books or courses, but candidates are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the role’s core competencies and, for tech roles, to be ready to discuss and showcase relevant projects
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/starling-hire-how-to/
