Bang go the banking jobs?
According to some of your comments on a recent article, it does. However, our conversations with banks' graduate recruiters suggest the issue is a little less clear cut.
We asked five banks whether they planned to increase, decrease, or hold graduate hiring numbers for 2008 at the record levels of 2007. One said they'd cut them (for reasons entirely unrelated to the credit markets); three said they'd probably hold them the same; and one said it planned to increase numbers by another 21%.
Some of the big US banks are still growing in Europe. Malcolm Horton, head of European graduate recruitment at Lehman Brothers, said the bank remains focused on extending its geographical reach: "We are still expanding in products and markets across Europe and Asia. This gives us the opportunity to add juniors at a steady rate despite current market turbulence."
If the crisis gets worse it may become more important than ever to land a summer internship, however. If full-time numbers are cut after intern numbers for next year have been finalised, a recruiter at one large European bank said banks may take all their full-time 2009 hires from the 2008 summer internship pool.
She also advises against taking a year off if you've got a full time offer: "People are still coming back to us and saying they want to go off and do a masters. They don't seem to realise that if you've been offered a job right now, you really need to take it in case things deteriorate."
