BLACKROCK HR HEAD: 'We are hiring more liberal arts majors'
And as the digitization of Wall Street continues to transform finance, firms will likely hire more talent with logical and STEM skills.
But tech skills aren't the only thing Wall Street is looking for.
BlackRock, the alternate asset management firm with over $5.7 trillion assets under management and about 13,000 employees, is also interested in graduates with backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences.
Speaking at Singularity University's Exponential Finance conference in New York, the chief talent officer of BlackRock, Matthew Breitfelder, said his firm is hiring more liberal arts majors.
The reasoning behind the move is that having employees with varying skill sets and worldviews would help the company. "Diversity is more important than ever," he said while speaking on a panel about the future of work. He didn't mention how many liberal arts majors the firm plans to hire.
Since robots are now doing things such as building portfolios and other mundane financial tasks, the jobs at asset management firms are changing. As such, financial professionals are spending much more of their time in front of clients and coming up with solutions.
Breitfelder thinks bringing on people with myriad perspectives and backgrounds is one way to come up with solutions for the new problems financial firms are trying to tackle.
The human resources veteran, who holds a master's from the London School of Economics and an MBA from Harvard's Business School, advises Wall Street hopefuls to have a holistic understanding of the new world of finance.