Personal Banker

Most of the day is other people's ordinary money — an account opened, a limit raised, a payment that did not arrive, a customer who cannot make this month's repayment. The lending is small, standardised and decided against a policy grid rather than a written argument, which makes it a volume seat rather than a judgment one.

The most open door in the bank: school leavers, graduates, career changers and people out of retail and hospitality all arrive here, and more senior bankers came through it than through any other seat.

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 hold a commercial target and a duty to the customer in the same conversation without dropping either — the whole conduct question in miniature.

What you learn here about how people actually behave under repayment pressure is the same instinct a business lender applies to a larger balance sheet; the counter is where most credit careers get their first thousand repetitions.

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.