Interning by Zoom now ‘business as usual’ at RBC
Get ready for another summer of virtual wellness sessions, hackathons and Zoom coffees.
Remote networking with new bosses and peers — and occasionally even the CEO — will again be the norm as students prepare for a second year of interning from home for Canada’s biggest banks.
Royal Bank of Canada said Tuesday it plans to welcome more than 1,400 summer interns virtually as of May, with this year’s program building on some of what the bank learned last year when it scrambled to move its student
program online. RBC rivals Bank of Nova Scotia and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce also said they plan to host 500 and 550 students this summer, respectively.
“Last year was like flying the airplane
as we were building it,” said Brien Convery, national director of early talent, communities and inclusive recruitment at RBC.
As the COVID-19 pandemic was hitting Canada and the U.S. and U.K., the bank’s two other markets for student hiring, Convery’s team was in the midst of on-campus recruiting for summer jobs ranging from client-facing positions to technology to head-office jobs.
Still, RBC stuck to the commitments it had made and brought post-secondary students on remotely, hosting a virtual welcome day instead of the event it would have held in a large Toronto hotel ballroom.
“This year what’s different is this is business as usual for us. We’re now really comfortable with the uncomfortable idea of virtually on-boarding students,” Convery said in an interview. During the month of April, the bank will host an online cafe for students to chat and get to know each other as well as their future co-workers.
Like last year, the summer will include events like hackathons — coming up with new ideas or technologies at a sprint-like pace — online learning and a speaker series with RBC leaders. It’s a similar approach to that taken at the Bank of Nova
Scotia, which will welcome 400 Canadian students (500 in total) this year to Altitude, the summer program it built and quickly branded in 2020.
“When COVID hit, we didn’t want to just move our internships virtual and do the exact same thing. We wanted to reimagine what we could provide the students as an experience,” said James Spearing, vice-president of global talent acquisition at Scotiabank.
“2021 is an evolution of what we did last year,” he said in an interview, adding that included fireside chats and master classes led by the bank’s CEO, Brian Porter, as well as 20 of its executive vice-presidents. Scotia’s summer Altitude program, which doesn’t include interns working in bank branches, includes students in the U.S., U.K. and Europe, while the bank’s Latin American operations have separate student programs.
Student programs are a key part of the banks’ overall recruitment strategies and CIBC, Scotiabank and RBC all said they have increased their focus on hiring from diverse backgrounds. RBC said more than 40 per cent of its summer students are Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) and Scotiabank said almost 60 per cent of its co-op students and interns this year are BIPOC, while more than 55 per cent are women.
“Gender has been an area that we’ve focused on for longer, but we’ve definitely shifted and pivoted to many different areas of diversity,” Spearing said.
Many internships across the country were cancelled last year amid the uncertainty of the early months of the pandemic. In May, Statistics Canada said that a crowdsourced survey completed by more than 100,000 post-secondary students found that 35 per cent had a work placement cancelled or delayed because of COVID-19.
A report this month from RBC Economics showed that young women were disproportionately affected: 15 per cent of women between age 20 and 24 were hit by job losses between February 2020 and the start of 2021. That compared to 11 per cent of men in the same age group.
But banks and others in the financial sector have largely continued with internship programs that host hundreds of students virtually.
KPMG Canada, one of the Big Four accounting firms, said Tuesday it will hire more than 1,400 students this year over three time periods in January, May and September, which is up from last year.
CIBC will also host slightly more students this summer than last year and spokesperson Trish Tervit said the “program continues to thrive despite the effects of COVID-19,” offering interns the chance to get to know the bank’s business and workplace culture.
Erin Miller, associate vicepresident of human resources at Toronto-Dominion Bank, said TD’s student program will go virtual again this year in Canada and the U.S., and will include a leadership speaker series, virtual yoga and training on how to be an ally to diverse colleagues.
The summer will include events like hackathons, online learning and a speaker series with RBC leaders