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Webinar tip · 22 October 2026

220 job titles, just four key skills

A bank struggling to hire tech talent found its 220 confusing job titles came down to four skills, and rebuilt its hiring around them.

Lewis CohenAMS

Non-tech employers often struggle to look like a natural home for tech talent. Lewis Cohen of AMS described how one bank, which was losing candidates to tech firms, turned that around.

What the bank did

AMS reviewed the 220 tech role profiles and job titles the bank was advertising. Many only made sense inside the bank, and meant little to anyone in the wider tech market.

Underneath them sat just four key skills that ran through every one of the 220 roles. The bank rebuilt its tech employer proposition and its outreach around those four skills, so candidates could see where they fitted.

What to do this week

  • List the job titles you advertise for one hard-to-fill family of roles.
  • Ask: would an outsider understand what each one does?
  • Identify the handful of skills those roles share, and lead your adverts with them.
Read the clip transcript

but one challenge that non-tech companies have is presenting themselves to the market as a logical destination, a compelling destination for tech talent versus tech companies. The client was struggling to attract and it was also losing a lot of candidates from the process to other opportunities at tech firms. So what we did there was we conducted an analysis of 220 tech role profiles and job titles that the bank was going to market with that didn't necessarily make sense. They were very banky, very about that bank as opposed to appealing to, or at least not even appealing, just making sense to the tech talent landscape as a whole. And we narrowed that down to four key skills that underpinned all of those roles. All of those 220 roles had four key skills. And so we created a new EVP for tech hiring based around those four key skills, new reaches out into the market based around those four key skills.

From the webinar · May 2023

Skills-Based Organisations and the Future of Talent Acquisition

Watch the full hour free, on demand.

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