Page Partners : Barclays – The Bank That Knows How To Rig A Room

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I literally just rejoined Barclays Bank, for fuck sake.

Not as staff. Calm down, compliance goblins.

I mean Barclays had just wandered back into my life through the ordinary adult misery of banking. Then Page Partners coughed up the bank’s Page Outsourcing connection, and there it was again: Barclays, grinning from the corporate swamp like a fraud allegation in a tailored suit.

Because Page does not just work with obscure side-door clients. Page works with the big names. The blue-chip names. The household names. The brands that sell trust with one hand and keep a mop beside the skeleton cupboard with the other.

Barclays is one of them.

And the Page link is not decorative. Page’s own materials say that, because of the complexity and volume of recruitment involved in creating a new team, Page Outsourcing proposed pre-screening all applicants before holding assessment days in Barclays’ offices. Barclays’ CFO testimonial also praises Page for translating “complex large volume hiring” into strategies, actions and results.

Pre-screening all applicants.

There is the phrase.

That is not a fucking footnote. That is the door.

The Bank That Knows How To Bend A Number

Barclays does not arrive at this table clean.

In 2012, the CFTC found that Barclays attempted to manipulate and made false reports concerning LIBOR and Euribor, sometimes daily over a four-year period. The CFTC also found that Barclays made artificially low LIBOR submissions during the financial crisis after instructions from senior management, to protect the bank’s reputation.

So when Barclays talks about trust, process, fairness and judgement, forgive TCAP for checking under the floorboards.

This is a bank with form for taking numbers the world relied on and turning them into a private casino chip.

Mortgages. Loans. derivatives. markets. Public trust. All of it sitting on benchmark rates that were supposed to mean something.

And Barclays was caught with its fingers in the machinery.

Not a typo. Not a wobble. Not a spreadsheet having a nervous breakdown.

A benchmark-rigging shitshow.

Then Came Forex

As if LIBOR was not enough, Barclays also took a kicking over foreign exchange.

In 2015, the FCA fined Barclays £284,432,000 for failing to control business practices in its FX business. The FCA said the failings undermined confidence in the UK financial system and put its integrity at risk. The CFTC also ordered Barclays to pay $400 million over attempted manipulation and false reporting of foreign-exchange benchmark rates.

So now we are not talking about one rotten plank.

We are talking about a whole fucking pier collapsing into the sea.

LIBOR. Euribor. FX.

Different benchmarks. Same smell.

The bank that knew how to bend numbers now appears beside a recruitment partner boasting about high-volume hiring, applicant pre-screening and candidate filtering.

Lovely.

The Dark Pool Was Not Very Holy Either

Then there was the dark pool.

In 2016, the SEC said Barclays agreed to settle dark-pool violations, admitting wrongdoing and paying $70 million across SEC and New York Attorney General penalties. The SEC said Barclays misrepresented how it policed its LX dark pool, did not continuously police for predatory trading as claimed, and overrode a surveillance tool in ways that meant some subscribers continued interacting with aggressive traders they had elected to block.

Read that slowly.

Barclays told people the pool was being watched.

Then the regulator said the watching was not what Barclays claimed.

A dark pool where the promised safeguards were not what they said they were.

A perfect metaphor, really. A black tank of finance with teeth in it, advertised as controlled water.

Now put that next to recruitment.

Because Page’s own pitch is also about process. Screening. systems. data. filtering. candidate flow. suitability.

And TCAP’s question is simple.

When Page screens humans for Barclays, who is watching the watchers?

Pre-Screening All Applicants

This is the Page Partners point.

Page’s Barclays material says Page proposed pre-screening all applicants before assessment days.

That phrase should make every disabled applicant, every candidate with a work gap, every person with a messy medical history and every jobseeker who has ever been quietly filtered out of a process sit up.

Pre-screening can be legitimate.

It can also be where discrimination goes to put on a suit.

Who decides who is “suitable”?

Who decides which gaps matter?

Who decides which health histories smell risky?

Who decides whether a disabled candidate is a talent prospect or a fucking inconvenience with paperwork attached?

Who decides whether a complaint gets escalated or buried?

Page’s own conduct in my case raises those questions. Redactions. DSAR mess. complaint handling. joinder. ET3 silence. attempted bail-out.

And now Page’s own material puts it inside Barclays’ high-volume recruitment machinery, screening applicants before they even hit the room.

That is not a side issue.

That is the whole corpse.

The Filter Is The Product

Page does not just sell candidates.

Page sells filtering.

That is the product.

It sells the client the idea that Page can sort the useful from the awkward, the polished from the complicated, the smooth CV from the human being with medical history, gaps, adjustments, complaints or inconvenient rights.

And for a bank like Barclays, that should matter.

Because Barclays’ public history is a long lesson in what happens when powerful institutions build systems, trust the systems, hide inside the systems and then pretend the system did the dirty work by itself.

LIBOR was a system.

FX was a system.

The dark pool was a system.

Recruitment is a system too.

And systems either protect people or process them into paste.

The Question For Barclays

So here it is.

Did Barclays ask Page how it screens disabled candidates?

Did Barclays ask what Page does with health-related employment gaps?

Did Barclays ask how Page handles discrimination complaints from candidates?

Did Barclays know Page had been joined to my Employment Tribunal claim?

Did Barclays ask why Page’s response, in my view, looked less like accountability and more like a corporate arse-covering exercise?

Or did Barclays just enjoy the convenience of a recruitment partner willing to filter the queue before the humans reached the bank?

Because that is what Page’s own Barclays material gives us.

Complex hiring. Large volume. Pre-screening all applicants. Assessment days in Barclays offices.

A nice clean funnel.

And TCAP is asking what gets strained out at the top.

The Page Partners Verdict

Barclays is a perfect Page Partners hit because the hypocrisy is clean enough to cut glass.

A bank with benchmark-rigging history, FX failings, dark-pool violations and customer-treatment fines appears beside a recruitment partner that boasts about pre-screening all applicants for complex large-volume hiring.

Page sells judgement.

Barclays sells trust.

Both have paperwork that smells like something died in the filing cabinet.

So the question is not just whether Barclays used Page.

The question is whether Barclays used Page to help filter people in ways Barclays would rather not explain under bright lights.

Disabled candidates. Health gaps. complaint-makers. awkward humans. people who do not glide through the spreadsheet like obedient little revenue units.

That is where this piece lives.

Not in the shiny testimonial.

In the filter.

Because when a bank with Barclays’ history buys recruitment screening from Page, TCAP is entitled to ask whether the machine is finding talent, or quietly removing the people who might make the bastards uncomfortable.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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