Financial services companies should broaden their recruitment horizons in order to find top trading talent, according to the founder of a new service that lets students play trading “games”.
Sean McCormack, CEO and cofounder of Stockfuse, said recruiting from traditional talent pools such as the Ivy League or Oxbridge universities could mean firms are overlooking the capable traders of the future.
His firm has designed a trading game which students can play in their free time, with the information made available to sponsor firms to help them identify promising new recruits.
“The current recruitment process is not only inefficient, but also exclusive, with many highly qualified candidates being filtered out simply because they don’t attend the right schools,” he said.
Traditionally, major financial services companies have conducted on-campus recruiting, but this is not expensive but also limited in scope, with some 99% of universities not covered.
By distributing trading games more widely to all universities, a much broader talent pool can be assessed, with top scorers invited to interview for entry level trading jobs.
The platform enables employers to not only identify those traders that make profitable decisions, but can also highlight particular traits of an individual, such as their aggressiveness, risk management and more.
As well as enabling firms to recruit, it can also be deployed internally to help guide the development of existing employees.
“You could use Stockfuse within your organisation to help guide people into the roles most suited to their trading style, or to identify areas where more training is needed, or even just to provide a friendly, competitive game for staff,” McCormack added.
He explained that there is no right or wrong way to play, but that each decision has to be justified with some rationale, to give potential employers an idea of whether individuals have the right decision making processes to make it on a trading desk.
In the future, Stockfuse hopes to add in scenarios to simulate events such as natural disasters or market shocks, to give further insight into how budding traders make their decisions.
It will shortly be launching its biggest ever game, taking place on a global scale and inviting anyone to take part.