eFinancialCareers

At last, a non-banking organisation that appears positively welcoming to ex-bankers. The Shareholder Executive, that branch of the government that manages the state’s shareholdings in the likes of Channel Four and Northern Rock, is replete with City types: 11 of the 14 members of its senior team have their origins in investment banks. Chief executive Stephen Lovegrove says two thirds of the people that the 50-strong Shareholder Exec has hired from... Read more

After this morning’s disastrous market performance in Europe, last night’s disastrous performance in Asia, and before this afternoon’s likely disastrous performance in the US, £200k may sound like a big paycheck. This is just as well, because as ex-banker Oliver Kamm at The Times points out, it makes sense for bankers who are being bailed out to earn less than the Prime Minister – and Gordon earns just £189,994. One... Read more

Ireland – which has established itself as a centre for banking IT operations – looked like a prime candidate to suffer in the light of shrinking technology budgets in financial institutions this year. However, appetite for hiring seems undiminished and performance has defied market conditions. First Derivatives, an Irish-based firm that provides support services to the investment banking market and derivatives technology industry, has posted a 21% increase in profits... Read more

Forget Morgan Stanley (for a moment), is Deutsche going to be next in line for something unpleasant? Earlier this week, the German bank announced plans to expand its business and private clients division and to eliminate 1,100 jobs in the back office. But it has been silent over headcount in the corporate and investment bank. This is strange given that Deutsche’s corporate and investment bank is in a challenging place. According... Read more

Lost your job in banking and decided to commit some time to the general good? VSO is probably not the place to do it. Although The Times says VSO is in dire need of additional volunteers because its existing candidates are getting cold feet about mortgage payments and re-employment, ex-bankers are not being asked to fill the gap. We called VSO to enquire whether they are benefitting from the flood of... Read more

Now that bankers at RBS, Barclays Capital and possibly HSBC are all en route to becoming public-sector employees, what are the implications for their job security and compensation? Given that the government won’t have shareholder voting rights in the banks it’s recapitalising, it’s not going to be telling banks to put staff into early retirement and pay them a state pension. The only upside for job security is that the... Read more

Buck up, stop whinging about global financial crises and inadequate rate cuts, collect yourself, and start trading like a normal person with a book to churn. So says Jean Claude Trichet , president of the European Central Bank, fresh from his internationally coordinated rate cut. “Excessive pessimism is ill advised,” he says. Just you remember that. Who’s going to bail out the euro? (Telegraph) US might copy the... Read more

With the financial system in crisis and politicians of all hues calling for compensation to be capped, it’s easy to miss a more prosaic reason why bonuses are unlikely to reach stratospheric levels in future: broker dealers no longer exist. Ken Lewis underscored the point in a recent interview with Fortune magazine. “Merrill was paying typical Wall Street pay,” he said. “Their staff people were making a lot more... Read more

Mervyn King has weighed in on the bonus debate. The guvnor says big payouts have encouraged too many talented people to squander their lives in banking when they could have been doing something more constructive instead. King made his comments to the Treasury Select Committee. According to the Telegraph, King says young people look at City compensation packages and think they “dominate almost any other type of career ... It's... Read more

As a headhunter, I am a parasite who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. I know this to be true, since Geraint Anderson, the former Dresdner analyst now known to be City Boy, says so. It's the latest of many attacks upon my profession. Are we really that bad? Yes. How do I know? Well, at the Global Derivatives & Risk Management conference in Paris, our... Read more

With jobs harder to come by, bankers are behaving badly towards recruiters and headhunters, who are suddenly unable to slot them into comfortable new positions. “We’re starting to get a lot of angry emails,” says one structured credit headhunter. “Bankers are approaching us and questioning why we can’t place them in hedge funds or commodities businesses. They’re venting their spleens, but there just aren’t the jobs.” “Candidates are more rude... Read more

New entrants looking to break into the ultra-competitive fund management industry have a significant obstacle in their path: the notoriously difficult Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) programme. The professional qualification comes in three parts, takes four years to complete, and 80% of candidates fall before the final hurdle. Moreover, as more people take the exams, CFA insiders say the pass rate is bound to fall. A total of 119,000 candidates... Read more

Wall Street and the Square Mile might be kicking investment bankers into the street, but India is taking them on by the team-load. Sourabh Chattopadhyay, director of recruiters Options Group in Mumbai, says local players are competing for people with international banks: “Some international banks have lost key people in the last year and must bring in new talent to be competitive. Similarly, local players like Kotak, Enam and Edelweiss have... Read more

As banks step up their redundancy programmes, will young white males with little recourse to discrimination legislation find themselves at the sharp end of job cuts? “First we had to watch out for women, then ethnic minorities, then gay and transgender people, then disabled people – and now old white boys are suddenly playing the age discrimination card. It doesn’t leave us with many people to choose from,” says an... Read more

According to a study by the unlikely combination of Siemens and The Stroke Association, people who work in recruitment are particularly stressed – more so than lawyers, teachers, marketing professionals and bankers. The study doesn’t explain the precise source of recruiters’ angst but, according to the recruiters we spoke to, it’s partly attributable to the pay structure. “This is a sales job,” says one. “You’re working on commission so... Read more

If you want to make big money in life, the best careers to go for are (in descending order): trading, ‘general finance’ (AKA all areas of finance that aren’t trading or insurance), law, and…recruitment. Based on pay figures drawn from clients of wealth manager ‘The Route’, the average top end trader is earning £1.5m, the average top end ‘general financier’ is earning £1m, the average top end lawyer earns £572k,... Read more

Just when I thought I had seen every dirty trick in the murky world of recruitment, it seems we have now begun to plunge to new depths. A lot of this is supposition and I can’t verify a word of it, but if my suspicions are correct then we have entered a very dark period indeed. If you are sitting comfortably, then I will begin. Our story revolves around one... Read more