Talent Factory

Tara Yip: A key goal is attracting hard-to-recruit talents like engineers and experienced Java software developers in an extremely competitive labour market. We launched the Academy in 2021 with the aim of identifying more junior candidates who are easier to target and hire faster. At the same time, we need to provide some additional support to onboard them and train them to our very high standards and expectations to help them develop in the organisation. This is important because our aim isn’t only attraction, it’s also retention. The Academy is also perfectly in line with our employee value proposition WE ARE ALL IN. One of its pillars is “Growth”, because we want to unleash the potential of our employees as we are doing it for our clients. It’s key to creativity, innovation, better serving our clients, and contributing to a positive culture.

Emma Lanctuit: The integration and development process went really quickly. You learn so much so fast, including about working in teams. I want to mention another point that was an attraction for me. When I first encountered Swissquote, I was still in school, just beginning to work on my masters and wasn’t even looking for a job. When I interviewed though, it was with two women. Coming from an engineering academic environment where I was surrounded by only men, this made a big impression on me. And it made me feel like I could see myself in this company and made me want to be a part of it. Two years later, when I had completed my studies, I entered the Academy.

T.Y. : Hiring women has been a priority from the beginning of this programme. If it’s a challenge to find engineers, it’s even more a struggle to find female engineers. We set an ambitious goal that 40% of Academy recruits would be women and have been exceeding that. So, we make sure to have women involved in interviewing all the candidates so that they can see that there are women on our technical teams.

T.Y. : We launched it four years ago and have four waves of students each year, with three or four trainees in each wave. In addition to our target for women, we also track retention. Since the launch of Tech Talent Academy, we’ve been able to retain nearly 90% of the people who continue as Swissquote employees at the end of the training. It’s evident that participants are highly satisfied with their experience.

E.L.: I can add that when you join the Tech Talent Academy, you can feel the work that is behind it because it’s well organised between lesson and module. The programme is delivered by senior software engineers who explain how the technologies work and you have the chance to hear from each team at Swissquote. You have time to explore and think about what will be the best fit for you as well as to start learning about the environment, which helps with the eventual integration process. I entered almost at the start of the project and I know how much it has evolved since, with many improvements on top of what was already very good.

T.Y.: We’ll keep improving it and expanding to other areas and other jobs like the Banking Talent Academy, which we launched recently. We can use the knowledge base we have gained from the Tech Talent Academy elsewhere in the organisation and use it as a learning centre for other departments. I’m extremely proud of this programme and to see the number of women entering what had been a predominantly male environment.