Buried in Deutsche Bank's annual report: falling graduate recruitment, resurgent love for working there

Deutsche Bank’s annual report was released last week. It had the usual tidbits about senior banker pay, but there were some more interesting factoids buried deep within the 750+ page document.

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For one, Deutsche Bank is incredibly frank about its ~90k strong workforce, and provides coherent data for where they are, what they’re up to, and what gender they are. For example, the bank discloses that 37% of its people are based in Germany, of which 19,462 (51%) were female, 18,723 (49%) were male, and 5 were another gender. 

More interestingly, the bank discloses how many graduates it hired in any given year, employee commitment, the percentage of MDs, directors, and VPs that are women, and the number of staff that voluntarily left the firm in the last year (known usually as the attrition rate).

Here’s what Deutsche Bank revealed in its 2025 results.

Deutsche Bank isn’t hiring as many graduates as it used to

Worryingly, the size of Deutsche Bank’s intern intake has shrunk over the years. From a high of 1,177 graduates in 2023, the bank brought in just 1,025 in 2025. It was, however, more graduates than it brought in at the start of the pandemic, including the 2020 class, who would have been promised places before the pandemic.

Either way, Deutsche Bank is far from the only bank to trim the size of its graduate intake. Goldman Sachs, for example, hired just 2,600 interns in 2025, roughly on par with 2024, and well below 2023, 2022, and 2021. It was even lower than the 2,900 interns the firm brought on in 2015. 

Intern classes might get smaller still in the future. Back in 2024, there were (apparently serious) discussions about the impact that Generative AI could have on banking intern classes. The New York Times in March 2024 noted that banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were considering cutting their analyst classes by two thirds due to overwhelming potential of generative AI.

Deutsche Bank’s employees are pretty happy to be there

Of the many metrics that Deutsche Bank analyses among its employees, one of the most interesting is the “commitment index”, formerly known as the “commitment score”. According to Deutsche itself, this the percentage “of our employee survey respondents [who] feel committed to the Bank”.

Happily for Deutsche, the commitment score is doing great, standing at 68% in 2025, higher than the 67% that employees posted in 2024. It wasn’t as high as it got during the pandemic, however: between 2020 and 2023, Deutsche employees posted commitment scores between 69% and 71%. 

It is much higher, however, than the pre-pandemic average, when the figures was some 10% lower: between 2016 and 2019, for example, the bank’s commitment score was between 57% and 58%. People are loving their time at Deutsche Bank post-pandemic too, it seems.

Deutsche Bank hasn’t retreated once in its war to promote women

Last year, Deutsche Bank noted some of its goals around appointing women to Managing Director (MD), director, and Vice President (VP) roles. Its target was 35% overall. While it admitted that it “narrowly missed” that goal, it’s still increased the number of women in its top ranks substantially in the last few years.

The number of VP and director-tier women at the firm increased from 31.4% and 25.1% respectively in 2019 to 36.3% and 29.5%, respectively, in 2025. Those are increases of 16% and 18%, again respectively.

The firm had the most success in its promotion of MD-level women, however. Women were just 18.3% of MDs in 2019, and 23.3% of MDs in 2025. Proportionally, it was the highest increase from the sample, of 27%. 

People are leaving Deutsche Bank again, but that might be a good thing

Attrition – what Deutsche Bank calls “voluntary turnover” – is the departure of an employee of their own volition, rather than being ejected by their employer. It’s a number that varies significantly globally – at Bank of America, for example, it’s historically something around 14% to 15%, and it dipped to a critical 8% in the economic malaise following the pandemic.

At Deutsche Bank, there’s a significant regional variation between attrition rates. Germany itself has historically been a region with very little attrition: as low as 1.6% in 2015, and around 2.4% in the last 11 years. The region with the highest attrition has been APAC (curiously, the opposite of BofA), closely followed by the Americas, which is basically the USA.

Deutsche’s attrition rate generally increased between 2024 and 2025, except in Germany, where it decreased slightly). This seems negative on the face of it – people leaving Deutsche Bank seems bad for Deutsche Bank – but it’s good for the industry, and an indicator that the labour market is regaining some fluidity. People leaving Deutsche Bank also means more hiring for Deutsche Bank, too.

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