Are you being paid to defer your graduate place?
It's all the rage among law firms, so it was always going to be a matter of time before paying students to defer their start dates caught on in banks too.
According to the The Lawyer, Herbert Smith, Baker & McKenzie, Norton Rose, DLA Piper, and Simmons & Simmons are all paying students up to 10k to defer for up to 12 months.
University careers services say they haven't heard of banks doing it yet, but the head of graduate recruitment at one large firm and the now-ex head of graduate recruitment at another both say it's happening.
We reported back in October that UBS was offering graduates half their salary to defer for a year, a policy that the bank said was nothing new.
Now Credit Suisse is understood to have considered, and possibly implemented, something similar. Morgan Stanley is also rumoured to have implemented deferrals.
Neither bank returned a request for comment.
JPMorgan paid graduates to defer joining during the downturn of 2001-3, but says it is not doing the same thing this time around.
The head of graduate marketing at one bank says most deferral packages are unlikely to be as generous as those on offer at law firms: "I'd be surprised if people get that much."
She adds that deferrals create problems of their own because banks using them will have fewer places on offer in 12 months' time. However, the head of graduate recruitment at one large firm says this isn't always the case: "Once they've gone off and done something different a lot of people don't want to go into banking after all."
