A third layer to the recruitment process will check impersonation and eliminate casual candidates.
Getting employed in public sector banks will soon become trickier. To make the process of recruitment more meticulous, the Institute of Banking Personnel (IBPS), the nodal selection body, will introduce a third layer to weed out the not-so-serious candidates. However, scores from this preliminary exam will not be carried forward.
Last year, the body saw over 14 lakh applications for its 16,000 vacancies for probationary officers, which did not include posts for the State Bank of India.
For this financial year, IBPS has announced the recruitment of 16,344 officers, 3784 specialist officers and 30,683 clerks in the state-run banks. According to an Economic Times report, banks excluding SBI are expected to hire approx. 20,000 officers and 30,000 clerks next year.
IBPS witnesses about 40–50 cases of impersonation every year. The stricter hiring process will be implemented to improve the scrutiny procedure and outsmart the fraudsters.
SBI, the country’s largest lender, will be the first to hold the preliminary exam but IBPS will not introduce the three-phase system for candidates aspiring to work with private banks, regional rural banks, cooperative banks and other financial institutions immediately.