Vacancies for the future – Newspaper Kommersant No. 4 (7449) dated 01/12/2023

This year, Russian banks are planning to expand the number of new employees. According to experts, this will primarily affect IT and information security, as well as call centers. The need for hiring is associated with the relocation of part of existing employees abroad, which complicates the work of banks. In addition, lending institutions are shifting their focus from solving operational problems to strategic projects, which provides opportunities for offering new vacancies.

According to a Kommersant survey, a number of large banks, primarily private ones, plan to increase staff in the coming year. Alfa-Bank is going to increase the number of employees of mass specialties (mainly those who work with clients) by more than 5%, said the bank’s HR director Marat Ismagulov. Priority attention is also paid to IT and digital specialists, he specified. Sovcombank Group intends to increase hiring by 10-15%, mainly in such areas as IT, contact center, sales and insurance business. As a result, the number of employees of the group may increase to 28-29 thousand. As Sergei Khotimsky, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sovcombank, explained, “an increase in hiring this year is planned due to the growth of key business lines.”

MTS Bank plans to increase the team by 14%, mainly in the IT, information security, Data Science and CRM sectors, said Daria Kapranova, vice president of the bank for employee experience management and organizational development. At the same time, at present, 30% of the bank’s staff are IT-specialists. At the end of 2022, the number of employees in these banks also grew: in Sovcombank – by 8%, in Zenith – by 5%, in MTS Bank – by 7%.

Individual state-owned banks will also continue hiring. For example, PSB will recruit staff, including in new territories, where the bank actively began work last year, deployed a network of 200 branches, “creating more than 1.3 thousand new jobs.” However, not all banks are ready to disclose personnel policy plans now. Sberbank and VTB did not respond to Kommersant’s request. In addition, some organizations, such as Expobank, do not plan changes in the number of staff, said Galina Weisband, HR director of the bank.

At the same time, headhunters note that the situation in the economy is “not the easiest” and many organizations do not plan to actively hire staff. According to the head of the board of directors of the Top Contact recruitment agency Artur Shamilov, most likely, “more active hiring will begin in 2024, when the economy starts to grow.” Banks that plan to increase staff this year mainly “want to continue the development of digital technologies, the transition to remote channels for servicing the client base,” he believes.

According to Daria Anikina, Head of Ward Howell’s Financial Institutions practice, several factors influenced the banks’ plans. “Over the past year, part of the employees of financial, and not only, companies, especially those who work in IT, decided to move to other countries. Someone continues to work remotely, but by the end of the year, banks realized that this model was not entirely effective, and many began to gradually abandon this format of work,” she notes. This will require the hiring of new employees to replace those who have moved.

However, banks that have a wide network of branches (including Sberbank) are preparing this year for some reduction in the number of offices, which will eventually lead to the release of staff, Artur Shamilov notes. By reducing branches, banks are transferring an increasing number of customers to remote channels and digital services.

As a result, contact center specialists or big data specialists are required, and specialists who work in departments may not be hired at all at the moment, Mr. Shamilov sums up. In January-November 2022, the number of offices in Russia has already decreased by 1.6 thousand, according to the data of the Central Bank.

Development and new projects were frozen last year, because banks were forced to quickly rebuild many processes. “By the end of the year, the situation leveled off, and the focus shifted from solving operational problems to new, strategic projects. And, of course, this requires new specialists,” notes Ms. Anikina. In addition, according to her, last year for most banks was the year of searching for new directions of development, new solutions: the strategy was updated, the implementation of which also requires an expansion of the team.

Olga Sherunkova