Financial services firms have got new ways of assessing graduate applicants in the age of AI
Applications for investment banks' 2027 summer internships have opened in London and as we have observed, students are busy using agentic AI tools to create hundreds of applications. This follows a quadrupling of applications to Citi's EMEA internships during the 2026 recruitment season.
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Faced with such a massive increase in applicant numbers, banks and other financial services firms are having to reconsider how they select the students they want to hire.
Lizzie Louis, managing director at recruitment firm Dartmouth Partners, which runs graduate recruitment processes for various banks and boutiques, said clients have begun adding screening questions on students' motivations to their application processes. "The aim isn’t to eliminate AI altogethee, I’m sure it will be used to polish responses – but to create an opportunity for candidates to demonstrate genuine thought and self awareness," Louis tells us.
Louis says all applications sent through Dartmouth are assessed by humans rather than AI. "If you use AI, there's a danger that particular systems like applications they have written," she says. "For example, Claude likes applications written by Claude etc."
If students make it through the initial stages of the application process, Louis says they are then being quizzed much more closely in subsequent interviews. "Candidates are being asked to explain how they reached conclusions. Clients want to see how they respond to conflicting information and to assess their intellectual agility and ability to make sound decisions." These are human skills, says Louis. In the age of AI, Louis says employers will increasingly value candidates who can challenge and make decisions when information is ambiguous.
Some firms are also directly assessing graduate applicants' ability to use AI. Sam Leong, CEO of Trackr, which tracks student job openings, says hedge funds are asking how candidates use AI in their own lives. Louis says candidates' use of AI is being scrutinised during case studies in assessment centres. "Candidates are allowed to use AI, but clients are given a transcript showing them which questions were asked by the candidates and how they interrogated the responses."
Financial services firms want to hire graduates familiar with AI so that they can help train their existing staff. Bloomberg reported that one private banking intern this summer was given the task of improving AI use across his or her team.
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