Citadel Securities’ Alexander DiLeonardo wants new employees ready to manage on day 1, because in this AI world, they probably will.
“In a way, you’re almost hiring managers from day one,” DiLeonardo, Citadel Securities’ chief people officer, said Thursday during a panel discussion at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, DC.
DiLeonardo, who said he had just returned from speaking with students in Boston, said that at a time “when technical skills are being commoditized to an extent,” he’s focused on broader traits.
“You assess on behavioral characteristics that are more intrinsic and more broad,” he said. “Those are things like creativity, leadership potential, raw problem-solving ability, commerciality.”
DiLeonardo said leadership qualities are valuable right now because even entry-level employees are doing some degree of management when they delegate tasks out to AI agents.
“You need to bring people in who can think about, ‘How do I organize the problem? How do I disaggregate the work? How do I assign that to different people, as well as technology tools that can get that work done?” he said. “And then, what’s the cadence of kind of, like, performance management, checking on both the people and the technology tools as that progresses.”
The characteristics DiLeonardo is looking for largely echo what hiring managers at the market maker previously told Business Insider they want when hiring software engineers. The difference is that, with the advent of agentic AI, non-technical jobs arguably require more technical skills than ever before.
It’s not just Citadel Securities either. Business Insider has previously reported that big firms like Meta and McKinsey are revamping their interview processes to ensure prospective workers can demonstrate they are truly AI adept.
DiLeonardo said if employers shift their parameters to meet the current moment, they can find workers who meet a high technical bar, as well as those who are very adaptable and “can be the future leaders of your organization.” At the same time, he said firms need to understand how to meet the expectations of students who are eager to get to work.
“We spend a lot of time as an organization underwriting what every single individual who enters our organization from campus does in their first year,” DiLeonardo said. “It’s not about, ‘oh, here’s some extra capacity.”
