Revolut raised pay and slowed hiring as it received 1.6m job applications
In 2023, Revolut had over a million applicants for its infamously intense jobs and an applicant to job ratio of 500:1. Last year, it seemingly became even harder to get in.
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According to its recently published annual report for 2024, Revolut ended the year with 10,133 employees, up from 8,152 at the end of 2023. It received 1.57m total job applications (excluding internships) but grew its headcount by just 1,981. It's not clear exactly how many of those applicants were applying to new roles rather than vacated ones (Revolut's people tend not to spend too long there), but the report also said that 2024 saw the fintech's "highest-ever employee retention rate."
Revolut's hiring seemingly took a massive dip in the latter half of last year. Revolut announced that its headcount reached 10,000 back in April 2024. At the time, it said it wanted to reach 11,500 employees by 2025. Instead, average headcount for Revolut in 2024 actually ended up just below 10,000.
Why didn't Revolut hire? AI might be to blame. Revolut has been building AI tools that might have lessened the need for hires in areas like financial crime and customer support, including a scam detection feature and an upcoming AI customer assistant. Pavel Nesterov, head of Revolut's AI department, said via social media last month that his team was expanding, and hiring an array of engineers, data scientists and product designers. Roles in the AI team are also confirmed to be available remotely.
Hiring may have also been impacted by changes to Revolut's interview structure. For its 'Bar Raiser' interview, designed to assess culture-fit, Revolut said it "revis[ed] questions to align more closely with our value-based behaviours and introduc[ed] a deep-dive for each culture value." The changes to interview structure are presumably designed to root out what Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky calls "career harvesters" which may have prevented certain hires being made if they weren't deemed to be a right fit. Storonsky said recently that he wants independent employees who prefer having fun on the job than talking about how they feel.
Revolut's teams still grew significantly. Average headcount for Revolut's customer operations team (which includes customer support and financial crime) rose by more than 2,000 in 2024. Over 100 sales staff also joined.
Hiring might have been down at Revolut in 2024, but compensation was up. Pay per head for employees, consisting of 'wages, salaries and bonuses' as well as 'share-based payments' rose from £56.5k ($75.1k) in 2023 to £66.9k ($89k) in 2024. Share-based payments almost quadrupled.
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