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City News Desk With more banks planning cuts to headcounts bankers, are contacting headhunters and accepting temporary positions and postings abroad, according to one of London’s leading headhunters.
Fear among bankers is increasing in the capital after the latest news of job losses. According to estimates by the Centre for Economics and Business Research 27,000 financial staff were axed, 8.5 per cent of the total workforce in the City.
The figures are expected to be bleaker in the near future. For instance, HSBC is planning to dismiss 30,000 employees by 2013, and Credit Suisse will lay 3,500 off bankers over the same period, according to a report in the Financial Times. In the next few months, Citigroup will axe 4,500 jobs while Royal Bank of Scotland this month said it would get rid of 3,500 employees.
Investment bankers are now applying for new roles, such as temporary positions or new jobs abroad, according to Sonamara Jeffreys, a senior client partner at the executive search group Korn/Ferry Whitehead Mann.
“The level of interest in speaking to us has certainly gone up for a lot of [bankers] – some of whom hadn’t spoken to people like us for years”, Chris Hickey, managing director of the UK division of the recruitment group Robert Walters, told the Financial Times.
Companies outside the industry are benefitting from this trend, as bankers are searching for new roles that they would not have ordinarily applied for. Daren Cox, chief executive of Project Brokers, a business intelligence consultancy, makes an example of the last incorporation to his firm. “I’ve taken on a very senior ex-Royal Bank of Scotland guy who worked in investment baking for many years. He’d been out of work for a while… The benefit for a company like mine is that normally this kind of people would never be available – it’s an amazing opportunity. These are exactly the guys who you wouldn’t get in a growth market”, he said.
According to recruiters, Singapore and Hong Kong are particularly attractive destinations for those bankers who want to continue with their current role in banking but need to find another company to do so. “It is an increasingly mobile sector where people will travel to get the right role”, Mr. Temple stated. However, Hays and Michael Page, British’ largest recruitment firms, warned that the new incorporations to the financial sector decreased in Asia at the end of 2011.
Meanwhile, according to the report by the Financial Times, in New York more bankers are applying for traditionally unfashionable and relatively low-paid jobs, which shows the effect that the crisis is having on the financial industry.
Reporting by Paula Planelles Manzanaro
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