Wall Street has upped the ante on how quickly it's hiring for tech roles as a tight market for talent has forced firms to move fast or risk losing out.
A mounting demand for software developers and back-end engineers, in addition to stiff competition from Big Tech and fintechs, has led firms like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan to either speed up or adjust their interview process, external recruiters told Insider.
And while hiring tech talent has been hectic since the start the pandemic, things have ramped up this summer, recruiters said. In some cases, a process that typically took as long as two months is now being abbreviated to as short as a few weeks.
And it's not just banks that are getting squeezed by heightened competition and ambitious hiring goals — hedge funds in need of math whizzes and quants are also feeling the pinch.
Most of the quantitative portfolio managers participating in a Nasdaq survey in December said a lack of talent (55%) and manpower (87%) limits their ability to implement new datasets.
All this has led to a frenzied pace between external recruiters, internal talent teams, and candidates. Even shaving a few days off the process can make a big difference, Matt Stabile, manager of the data science and engineering recruitment team at Averity, told Insider.
Promising back-end engineers typically get "five to six internal or external recruiters reaching out to them a day; they could have 15 interviews lined up within three days," Stabile told Insider.
"If you're behind and you wait 72 hours, guess what? You're now 16th in line if all those other companies move quicker," he added.
Shaving recruitment from months to days
Landing a tech job on Wall Street can be an intensive process with about half a dozen interview rounds, according to Ryan Bulkoski, a partner at search firm Heidrick & Struggles. That includes a mix of phone interviews, coding tests, and in-person or video interviews.
But since the spring, firms have looked to move quicker, with the market ramping up even more this summer and into the end of the year, Jayson Bevacqua, assistant vice president at search firm Selby Jennings, told Insider.
"The hiring processes tend to be a little bit shorter because they realize if they continue to drag it out where some banking rounds used to be four or five-plus spanned over the course of two months — then that candidate's going to be off the market," Bevacqua said.
Finance firms are now consolidating the interview process by cutting down on initial phone calls with internal HR representatives, according to Bevacqua, Stabile, and Deepali Vyas, global head of fintech, payments, and crypto at Korn Ferry.
In other cases, internal hiring managers aren't eliminating specific steps, but are moving through the process faster by turning around feedback on coding tests quicker, scheduling next steps sooner, and being more responsive outside of business hours, according to Paul Manning, managing director of software and technology at search firm Bowdoin Group.
"The Amazons and the Googles, the war for technical talent in those businesses has been raging for eight, 10 years," Manning told Insider. "It's finally trickled down to other industries, banks being one of them."
JPMorgan, one of the more aggressive and faster-moving banks, has been "drinking from a fire hose" in terms of trying to attract engineering talent, Vyas said.
In one recent case, the bank hired a senior engineering associate in about three weeks, shaving about two weeks off the total process as a result of the hiring manager liaising the process, being more responsive, and scheduling next steps faster, Bevacqua said.
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are other banks speeding up their interviewing process for technical candidates, Bevacqua and Vyas said.
Morgan Stanley has simplified its application process, better structured its interviews to assess talent more quickly, and leveraged video interviews that have been easier to schedule than in-person ones, according to a person familiar with the bank's hiring processes.
Meanwhile on the buy-side, one prominent hedge fund is eliminating take-home technical tests for more senior-level candidates, Stabile said. And a large hedge fund in Connecticut is trying to create a more engaging and exciting candidate experience by starting the process off with an interview with the manager rather than using a coding test as an initial screen, Manning said.
New York-based Two Sigma has also moved quickly due to the competitive market, hiring additional recruiters to source, interview, and correspond with candidates, a person familiar with its hiring process told Insider. However, the overall process has not changed except for a pivot to video interviews during the pandemic, the person added.
"The quicker you move, the higher likelihood it is for success in hiring somebody," Stabile said. "Finance has been slower to take that advice as they have with other advice, but we are seeing them start to do that and to shorten the interview process."
'Interview fatigue' sets in for candidates and recruiters
The fast pace of hiring has created a hectic environment for all parties involved.
While recruiters are advising finance clients to speed up the hiring process to keep up with the competition, it does put additional pressure on candidates.
"They are being bombarded. None of my candidates right now have any less than three offers on the table," Vyas said.
"Just by the sheer volume of interviews that they're doing, there's interview fatigue," she added.
Meanwhile, external search firms helping with the hiring demands are nearing full capacity. Talent acquisition teams are "flat out right now," Vyas said.
"They are out of control," she added.
However, there's a certain level of balance needed between hiring as fast as the competition and still ensuring the candidate has enough time to feel comfortable.
"Part of the problem is the candidate pool — they have a lot of options so they have to get comfortable," Manning said. "So you want to go fast, but you've also got to go at a speed with which you get people comfortable."
