What's wrong with recruitment in Europe?

I was looking for different roles across Europe and I can't understand why university degrees are so important. The issue is that we aren't even talking about FO roles, instead, you need to have at minimum an undergraduate + MFin to even do a BO role.

Of all the countries I saw, Spain was the funniest, a sh*tty AM MO/BO role at a regional bank (Caixa) had 100+ applicants for operations with the requirement to have at minimum 6 months of experience in Audit, Consulting, or Investment Banking. Even FO roles at reputable brands require min. 3 years of prior experience. My question: Does HR even understand the jobs they're listing?

I think that my point is that Europe gotta chill because all those fancy jobs can be done with ~ 3 months of training.

An interesting observation was also how easy to see the economic landscape of those countries only based on LinkedIn Jobs. The same role in Germany/France had maybe 20 - 30 applications, meanwhile, in Spain and Italy, it had around 150. It seems that Bocconi, highly regarded around here, is pure suicide because alumni are even competing for regional banks (UniCredit, Intessa, etc.).

My conclusion:
Nordics > UK > Switzerland > Germany > Rest of Europe in terms of requirements listed to get the job/general competition.

Happy to hear a different perspective.

Most Helpful

You’re missing the point.

Masters (5 years) is standard degree in most continental Europe. It has been for the past 35 years I think. The bachelor equivalent has progressively become worthless on its own.

So the job requirement is to have the standard level of university education. In Germany, you’ll even find lots of people with phd in business or law as well. It’s cultural

Internships are very common too. Business schools in France require 18 months of qualifying (i.e. not mcdonalds) work experience to graduate (great stuff for companies considering how low they pay interns outside of banking).

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