Banks still hiring

Rumour has it investment banks are cutting back heavily on hiring after the credit crunch. Not true, say recruiters.

First, the (allegedly) bad news: in the wake of the credit crunch, banks are said to be trimming graduate hiring faster than you can say 'Following a strategic review we've reconsidered our resourcing needs.'

The Telegraph last week suggested some banking trainees were told their services were surplus to requirements when they turned up for work for the first time. We also heard from two separate sources in the graduate recruitment world that one large US bank has filled all its full-time 2008 graduate spaces with summer interns from 2007 (and is therefore cancelling its milkround appearances), and that another is making 2008 offers contingent on market conditions.

We've been here before: in 2002 businesses were forced to cut back on graduate hiring following 11 September 2001 and the bursting of the internet stock bubble; Accenture, for example, was rumoured to have offered all its graduate entrants the opportunity to delay their start for a year until conditions picked up again.

This time, however, banks are adamant recruitment will remain robust. Although we spoke to one bank which has increased graduate recruitment exponentially in recent years and now expects 2008 to be down, others are bullish. One European bank has yet to amend plans to double its intake from 70 in 2007. Another is aghast that its campus visits are rumoured to have been cancelled. And Lehman reiterates its intention to maintain hiring at the high levels of last year: "We don't take excessive risks. That has put us in a position where we can continue to expand in areas that make sense," says Malcolm Horton, the bank's head of graduate recruitment.

Both Oxford and Cambridge careers services say there has been no sign of banks pulling out of milkround presentations. "We had 40-odd banks attending our graduate finance fair and they were all very buoyant and optimistic," says Gordon Chesterman, head of the careers service at Cambridge University. He adds: "We see no evidence yet that the market has slumped, but at Cambridge we may admittedly be some of the last to do so."