Any aspiring college graduates looking to land a job at JPMorgan Chase don’t have to worry about their major.
These instructions come directly from the company’s CEO, Jamie Dimon. In an interview earlier this week, Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker asked Dimon what a young person who wanted to work at the $556 billion financial company should study.
“It almost doesn’t matter to tell you the truth because you’re looking for smart, ethical and decent people,” Dimon replied.
Although JPMorgan takes a more holistic approach to hiring campus recruits, it still prefers those with a background in finance.
“I think in business you should learn the language of business, which is accounting – a little bit of basic business,” Dimon said. “I think it would help accounting, finance, [or] Markets. So similar.”
The comments may come as a surprise to some who expected one of Wall Street’s most successful CEOs to say it was essential for aspiring bankers to study only finance or math. But the focus on hiring well-educated, albeit still experienced, candidates for open positions is a growing trend. Companies are no longer just looking for a select group of potential employees. Being open to applicants from different disciplines can help employers maintain a broader applicant pool.
“We value and recognize that talent is not limited to any particular group and that diverse experiences, perspectives and backgrounds enrich our workforce and contribute to our collective success,” a JPM spokesperson said in an email. They also explained that the bank hires candidates with a variety of degrees as it fills non-banking roles such as data science, marketing, human resources and technology.
According to Robin Leopold, the company’s chief human resources officer, JPMorgan prefers to pay attention to a candidate’s cultural fit rather than just focusing on their major. The questions recruiters at JPMorgan use to evaluate candidates are: “Will they fit in with the team?” Leopold said on LinkedIn’s Get Hired podcast. “How did you show up for the interview? Were they prepared? Were they curious? Do they represent our values?”
However, even something as intangible as cultural fit is scrutinized to ensure it is as equitable as possible. Some corporate circles move away from simply asking if a person is a “culture fit,” as this can reinforce unconscious biases by only hiring people who are similar to one another. Instead, it’s about evaluating whether a candidate can contribute to the company culture. Critics of hiring based on cultural fit alone believe that it provides a static view of a person’s talent that does not take into account whether or not they could be successful in a different work environment.
Hiring people with different educational backgrounds can also help increase the diversity of an organization. “[We] Definitely don’t just think about it from a race and gender perspective, we look at it as diversity of thought,” Leopold said.
To increase diversity, some companies have gone a step further than Dimon suggested and eliminated college degree requirements altogether. Last year, Linkedin found that the number of job openings that didn’t require a college degree increased by 90%. Some experts expect this trend to continue to spread and eventually become the norm. According to October data from the Department of Labor, 61% of high school graduates in the U.S. enroll in college. But lately, a degree hasn’t been a surefire way to get a job. In 2023, 70% of bachelor’s degree holders between the ages of 20 and 29 had a job, up from 76.4% the year before.
The growing trend to remove degree requirements from employment criteria gained momentum during the pandemic labor market crisis. As companies desperately wanted to fill their open positions, they began looking in unusual places and changing their requirements. Some – including JPMorgan – eliminated the requirement for a bachelor’s degree when they realized that more than 60% of Americans do not have a college degree. A company spokesman said 80% of the bank’s current positions for “experienced employees” do not require a college degree.
“Of course we go to universities, but that’s not the majority of our positions,” Leopold said during her podcast appearance. “We’ve really been able to identify talent in all areas and all locations and I think that actually strengthens our company.”
When Dimon has spoken about education in the past, he has urged colleges and educational institutions to provide students with good jobs, not graduation rates. “If you look at kids, they have to have an education to get a job,” Dimon said in an interview last month. “I think schools should be measured: Did the kids come out and get a good job?”
This story was originally published on Fortune.com