Kazakhstan's Halyk Bank Now Competes With Tech Giants for Digital Talent

From Bankers to Product Teams: Halyk's Hiring Shift

Kazakhstan's Halyk Bank says the classic banker is no longer the centrepiece of its workforce. In an interview with Forbes Kazakhstan, Gulsum Dushatova, managing director for transaction business, and Indira Ashirova, director of the personnel management department, described how the lender's digital push changed what it hires for — and who it competes against for staff.

According to the executives, the shift was driven by how banking is now consumed. Clients open accounts through the Onlinebank service without visiting a branch, receive payment requisites the same day, pay around the clock and can obtain a tender guarantee in ten minutes without collateral or paper documents — claims the bank makes about its own services. The bank, they argue, is no longer a place customers visit but a service embedded in smartphones, marketplaces and business processes. Creating such products requires product managers, data analysts, designers and industry experts working alongside traditional bankers, which is where the hiring model changed.

The change also put Halyk on the same labour market as IT companies, fintechs, startups and international technology firms. Its HR department now weighs candidates on learning ability, cross-functional teamwork and data-driven decision-making as much as on experience. To reach specialists who are not actively looking for work, the bank built a professional community around its Halyk OIY hackathons and tech conference, the Halyk Championship League internal competitions, Halyk Meetup events and the Halyk Academy university programme. Recruiting has been partly automated with RPA and, increasingly, AI-assisted screening — though the executives stressed that final decisions remain with people.

What Halyk's Talent Strategy Says About the Digital Banking Race

Halyk Bank and the Race for Data Talent

The core argument from Dushatova and Ashirova is that a bank's most valuable hires are no longer bankers. They name data scientists and data analysts as the most sought-after specialists, alongside product managers, API developers and UX researchers, and say these roles are contested not just by banks but by fintechs, big tech and startups. That is a plausible reading of the market: a bank holds financial data at a scale that makes AI and personalisation projects viable, but it must defend those projects against employers offering stronger engineering cultures and, often, higher pay.

How Halyk Builds Teams Around Problems, Not Job Descriptions

The described model starts with the business task, not the vacancy. Halyk says it assembles combinations of roles — product, analytics, development, business — around specific problems and measures team performance by release speed, stability and product quality. The executives acknowledge that long job descriptions and templated interviews work less well, and that speed of hiring has become a competitive advantage. This is consistent with the broader industry drift toward a skill-based model, where real competencies matter more than formal positions; the interview confirms Halyk is moving that way, including through internal competence assessment and reskilling.

AI in HR: Faster Screening, Human Decisions

Halyk's use of AI in recruitment is incremental: automated candidate search, skills matching, initial communication and analysis of interview responses, plus analytics on burnout, attrition and competence gaps. The stated principle is that AI supports decisions while HR and business leaders make them. Two expectations from the interview are worth tracking: rising demand for AI product managers, AI architects and specialists in AI governance and risk, and the view that data literacy — including prompt writing — will soon be required of managers and business teams, not only developers. Neither is a market forecast, but both indicate where the bank is steering its workforce.

What Bank HR Teams and Tech Specialists Should Take From Halyk

For HR and business leaders in banks and financial services:

• Start with the business task, not the vacancy. Halyk's executives say role combinations assembled around a concrete problem beat the search for a single ideal candidate, so define the mission before writing the job description.
• Treat hiring speed as a competitive weapon: the same interview argues the best specialists are rarely job-hunting, so community channels — hackathons like Halyk OIY, conferences, meetups and university partnerships — matter more than posting adverts.
• Build the AI-governance pipeline now: the executives expect demand for AI product managers, AI architects and AI risk and ethics specialists, which implies banks should be reskilling internal staff for these roles rather than waiting for the market.

For technology professionals considering a banking career:

• Cross-functional profiles are the most valued: the interview repeatedly highlights people who translate business problems into product hypotheses and work effectively with IT teams, so pair technical skills with product or data experience.
• Banking roles offer large-scale financial data and real API integration work, which the executives say sit at the core of data science and product management jobs.
• Expect evaluation beyond the CV: Halyk describes using technical interviews, case studies and test assignments where the reasoning process matters as much as the final answer.