Deutsche Bank

The Challenge

In a global corporate restructure, Deutsche Bank was relinquishing it’s retail banking functions among others to focus its growth in a new direction. In the midst of large-scale redundancies, the company needed to create a fresh brand impression in order to hire new talent, bring its tech team inhouse and stop costly outsourcing.

Historically, they had struggled to attract a diverse range of talent but needed a new approach to achieve technological innovation and get their investment off to a positive start.

The Objective

Pulling in our expertise across the board, _nology set out to create a diverse team of talent and put technology at the centre of Deutsche Bank’s transformation.

Helen Tippell

CTO, Deutsche Bank

“The _nology curriculum focuses on key practices and methodologies that are hard to learn. Students graduate with a deep understanding of new methods and practices and evangelise them from their first day in our organisation. They come ready armed, having only ever learned best practices rather than having to break old habits.”

The Solution

We developed a three-stage programme which focused on the attraction and selection of new external and internal talent, before implementing a 16-week full-stack software development training course designed to create the bank’s ideal developer.

Full branding and external search and selection campaign

We worked with marketing and HR teams at Deutsche Bank to create a 12-week advertising campaign to attract a different kind of candidate; one which wasn’t defined solely by their experience in technology. We used our contacts, social platforms and PR channels to promote the programme through the partnership, before putting applicants through our bespoke selection campaign to test for potential rather than past experience.

The campaign received 2000 applications with enough strong candidates to fill the course two to three times over! What’s more, we achieved a 50% female intake: well-above average.

Full branding and internal search and selection campaign

We simultaneously ran an eight week internal marketing campaign to encourage current employees to consider retraining to the technology division. Internal communication strategy developed to ensure messaging, support and cooperation between tech and HR teams, to support candidates with career progression, salaries, job titles and crucially management encouragement and support.

The internal campaign attracted 44 applicants from our test pool of which the mandate was to select four, and improved pathway options within the company to support retention of staff. The PR around investment in staff, training and reskilling was uplifting among the recent reports, and there is the potential to launch the programme across the organisation and reduce the need for redundancies.

Full-stack software development course

While new candidates applied during the duration of the campaigns, the _nology team developed a bespoke 16-week course with the existing tech team to align training to improved tech stack and specific project and programme requirements. Through determining the ideal developer for Deutsche Bank, we included training in Angular, Java and best practices such as test-driven development, and coaching in company values, culture and professional skills.