JPMorgan to hire 2,000 engineers even in recession

On Wednesday, Lori Beer, chief information officer of financial holding JPMorgan Chase & Co, said the company plans to hire about 2,000 engineers from various countries by the end of the year, despite the current economic situation.

Last year, the company hired over 5,000 software developers and data analysts. While the labor market is watching a trend towards job cuts and hiring cessation by IT giants, JPMorgan Chase & Co plans to attract about 2,000 employees. The number of technical specialists of the bank around the world is about 278,000 people, which is approximately equal to 20% of the total staff.

Beer said that JPMorgan certainly continues to hire workers. The investment points to the fact that the bank is a "safe place in an uncertain economic climate," she said. Beer also noted that entering into difficult economic times, and being in a rapidly changing environment around, can have a positive effect.

Beer also notes a slight decrease in competition in the high-tech job market with fewer applicants considering multiple job offers at the same time. With the start of a slowdown in global economic growth, there has been a decrease in hiring of new staff and job cuts by individual companies in the technology sector, as well as financial institutions and cryptocurrency platforms.

Over the past few years, the financial sector has faced intense competition for workers from the IT sector, which pays its employees high amounts of compensation in the form of company shares. In addition, firms in the technology sector, rapidly developing new products and services, hired engineers, providing them with benefits in the form of additional benefits and trying to develop an informal culture.

Banks, on the contrary, were organizations that used outdated technologies in their work and, as a rule, resisted the introduction of any innovations.

However, JPMorgan Chase & Co is making some efforts to refute this opinion, Beer said.

“How to bust the myth and help people understand the innovation going on here?” Beer said, highlighting the opportunities to work on projects that affect millions of customers or involve trillions of dollars.

JPMorgan's plan to spend $14.1 billion on technology this year is being questioned by analysts.

JPMorgan's executives shared some of the initiatives at the May Investor Day. Among them: personalization of the mobile application, improvement of payment offers for e-commerce and modernization of infrastructure. Increasing investment in proprietary technology has become a priority for many US banks in recent times.

A three-day event took place in Texas this week when Sandhya Sridharan, head of core engineering at JPMorgan, joined Beer and other heads of the bank's core technology divisions to welcome a group of mostly vice presidents and coding staff, supporting the bank system.

“A lot of what we have has to do with human interaction — the networking, the collaboration, the trust that is built and that can't be done through Zoom. We would like practitioners to come and learn from each other,” said Sridharan.