What is it? The RBS Group is Europe’s second largest financial institution with more than 2,000 high-street branches in the UK and Ireland. The group includes brands such as NatWest, Churchill and Tesco Personal Finance.

What does the group employ graduates for? There are 200 vacancies for 2005, mainly in banking, finance, general management, IT and human resources.

Where are the graduate jobs? Throughout the UK.

What will graduates earn in 2005? Graduates were paid up to £26,600 in 2004, depending on job function and location.

What’s the competition like? There were about 60 applicants per vacancy in 2003 and 2004.

How has the RBS Group done in the Top 100?
2000: No entry
2001: No entry
2002: 53
2003: 38
2004: 15

IT IS not hard to understand why just 5 per cent of last year’s university finalists applied for jobs with a high street bank. Years of overdraft charges, punitive interest rates, refused credit and unsympathetic staff often leave graduates with a less-than-positive impression of the organisations with which they banked at university, Martin Birchall writes.

But for those who can see beyond their current account, Britain’s high street banks have much to offer. Together, the best-known names have more than 1,000 vacancies for graduates in 2005 and the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS), one of the biggest recruiters in the sector, expects to hire a fifth of these.

The bank is one of the fastest-climbing employers in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers this year and part of its appeal is the range of opportunities. Since its takeover of NatWest in 2000, the bank has developed into the fifth-largest financial institution in the world and there are no fewer than 11 different business areas which recruit graduates in the UK.

Only 10 per cent of the vacancies are in retail banking, the high street “face” of RBS. Instead there are positions for university-leavers in corporate banking, operations management, and technology, working in London, Edinburgh and other locations in the UK.

Elsewhere in the group, the insurance business, famous for the red telephone of Direct Line and Churchill’s nodding dog adverts, has vacancies in Croydon and Leeds. Coutts & Co, Britain’s oldest and most-respected private bank, recruits a limited number of graduates each year for its 40 offices worldwide, including Switzerland, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai.

Graduate training varies, but typically lasts between 12 and 36 months, and often includes sponsorship for relevant professional qualifications. The selection process for all positions includes an online application and numerical competency questionnaire, a telephone or face-to-face interview, and then a rigorous one-day assessment.

Martin Birchall is editor of The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers

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