BNP Paribas is a European Bank with an international reach in 71 countries with over 198k employees and is No.1 worlds best bank for corporate responsibility (Euromoney 2019). BNP Paribas Personal Finance is part of the overall BNP Paribas group. Personal Finance is in 28 countries with 25m customers and 22k employees world wide. 
In the UK, group BNP Paribas Personal Finance is located in Solihull and Belfast, with c800 employees and 4m customers. We work with c300 partners to provide finance to help customers fund purchases (eg Dixons Carphone, DFS, Dreams) as well as providing direct credit cards, loans, motor finance, home improvements and finance for insurance products.
We welcome a new customer every 22 seconds.
BNP Paribas Challenge
In a very active labour market, BNP Paribas Personal Finance are competing to attract new employees to their business; this is becoming ever more challenging. In July 2021 the ONS provided insight that suggested 90% of employers planning to hire at fastest rate for 28 years and there were over 1m vacancies as at the end of July (this is the highest on record), but the labour pool is much diminished for all roles, upward pressure on pay with average pay rising by 10.1% (ONS).
In this challenging market our traditional routes for attraction and recruitment need to adapt.
We are looking to seek insights from students/graduates to:
- Understand their perception of working in the financial services sector
- What (if anything) they know about our organisation
- What barriers may exist in considering working in financial services or BNP Paribas Personal Finance
- What would attract them to apply for a role in any company and what would they expect the recruitment journey to look like.
Objectives, outcomes and impact
We have decided to take part in reverse mentoring to get an understanding of potential future applicants to our business. The students/graduates will be able to provide us with a unique perspective on potential barriers in considering working in financial services and help us seek ways to overcome these barriers.
We hope that the insights the mentors will provide us will help us:
- Understand current perceptions of our business and our sector.
- Help us identify where and how we need to adapt our recruitment process to ensure we attract future talent.
- From this we will make changes to our attraction and recruitment process.
Length and frequency of meetings
1 hour every 2 weeks for 3 months (flexible here)
Location will be via Microsoft Teams – contact from BNP Paribas will provide the invites and links for all students to join.
We are interested to hear from all students with a wide and diverse background. The more diverse the better!
Reasonable adjustments are able to be made to support students with disabilities.
Join
Deadline date - Sunday 23 January 2022 (23:59).