Company details

London, UK

HEADCOUNT

10000+

ORG TYPE

Corporate

SECTOR

Finance

WEBSITE

https://home.barclays

About the company

Barclays is a multinational bank and financial services group with major businesses in UK retail banking and international corporate and investment banking. Barclays serves consumers, small businesses, corporates, and institutional clients through products like lending, payments, cards, markets, and wealth services. Barclays also runs large technology, operations, and data teams that build and maintain banking platforms at scale. Barclays is headquartered in London and operates globally.

Locations and presence

Barclays has major UK hubs including London (Canary Wharf), Glasgow, Manchester, Knutsford (Radbroke), and Northampton, alongside a wide international footprint. Barclays has tightened office attendance expectations in recent years, with public reporting describing a minimum three-days-a-week in-office baseline for many roles, while client-facing teams can be more office-heavy.

Palpable Score

76.1

/ 100

Barclays gives graduates and students multiple reliable entry points through internships, a structured graduate programme (Explorer and Expert paths), apprenticeships, and an earlier Discovery programme. The main downside is that, despite clear official stage descriptions, candidate communication and closure can still feel uneven at scale. Learning support and early-career community design are strong, while published outcome metrics like conversion rates and time-to-promotion are still limited.

Pillar 1: Early-career access

Score

18.0

/ 20

The company offers a broad Early Careers catalogue spanning apprenticeships, internships (including off-cycle options), graduate programmes, and student discovery programmes, rather than relying on occasional junior roles.

Barclays runs a Graduate Programme split into Explorer (rotational) and Expert (specialist) pathways, which creates credible “first job” routes across multiple functions.

The company keeps early-career hiring concentrated into named programmes, which is excellent for access, but means some teams still hire junior talent mainly through the programme cycles rather than year-round entry roles.

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Pillar 2: Hiring fairness and transparency

Score

13.8

/ 20

The company publishes a clear internship and graduate application journey that includes online assessments, interviews, and an assessment centre with defined components like a motivational interview with leadership.

Barclays sets expectations for the assessment centre format and uses strengths, behaviours, and technical skills as stated evaluation themes, which helps candidates prepare for what’s being measured.

The company has repeated candidate reports describing long waits after assessments or interviews without timely closure, which weakens fairness even when the official stages are clear.

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Pillar 3: Learning and support

Score

16.0

/ 20

The company describes Explorer graduate programmes as two-year pathways with job-specific training up front, rotations across teams, and a supportive graduate community with mentors and peers.

Barclays frames internships as “responsibility from day one” roles with a named people leader plus buddy and mentor support, which is more than a basic placement model.

The company positions apprenticeships as permanent roles with professional training and a dedicated talent coach, but Barclays does not publish a single consistent onboarding standard for early-career hires outside the big programmes.

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Pillar 4: Pay fairness and stability

Score

13.8

/ 20

The company states a clear salary for higher, degree, and graduate apprenticeships (£25,000 from day one) and emphasises “paid from day one” across the apprenticeship pathways.

Barclays includes minimum and maximum salary or rate information on some US internship and analyst postings where pay disclosure is required, which improves transparency for those locations.

The company often does not publish salary ranges on UK graduate and internship programme pages, so early-career candidates can still struggle to benchmark compensation before applying.

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Pillar 5: Early-career outcomes

Score

14.5

/ 20

The company has strong early-career sentiment signals from intern review profiles, with high ratings across a meaningful number of intern and summer intern reviews.

Barclays builds progression into programme design through rotations (Explorer) and specialist development (Expert), which creates real internal mobility opportunities early in a career.

The company does not publish programme outcome stats like internship-to-offer conversion rates, graduate completion-to-role mapping, or early-tenure retention, which limits confidence about typical timelines after the first placement.

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Useful links & resources

Barclays Early Careers Internship and Graduate Application Process Barclays Apprenticeships