People Partner (HR)

Advisory rather than administrative: workforce planning, capability, performance and the difficult conversations. In a bank it carries a regulatory edge most HR does not — remuneration that must not reward the wrong behaviour, accountability regimes, conduct records that follow a person between employers.

HR backgrounds, and increasingly people from the business who move across; the specialist areas — reward, employment relations — hire on their own expertise.

These are the shapes the round takes, not a question bank — banks phrase them differently and the wording is never the point.

What the panel is listening for. Whether you can be the business's partner and the institution's check at once — the seat is not credible if it can only do one.

Incentives are why banks make bad loans in good years; understanding how a lending decision is actually made and measured is what lets you design a scorecard that does not quietly buy risk.

That is the general case as well as this one. A bank's technology is not ordinary technology and its finance is not ordinary finance, and the second and third lines of defence — risk, compliance, financial crime, model validation and internal audit — recruit heavily out of the functions, taking the people who can already read a business. The case drills are free and are the cheapest way to build that, whichever column you sit in.