EDITOR'S TAKE: The mutant post-Lehman employment scene

It's now fairly clear what impact Lehman's evisceration has had on the investment banking employment market, and it's not entirely as expected.

1) Broker dealers are still hot

One year after the broker dealer model was proclaimed deceased and everyone thought banks would come to resemble Thames Water, the arch broker dealer has gone from strength to strength.

Goldman Sachs may have become a bank holding company and reduced leverage to 12:1 (from 24:1), but it hasn't really made a huge amount of difference to its business model.

"Our model really never changed," CFO David Viniar said in July. "We've said very consistently that our business model remained the same."

Based on purely financial considerations of likely compensation, Goldman remains the employer of choice. This is not bad for an institution that continues to rely on wholesale funding and whose survival was open to question just 10 months ago.

2) Traders are still sexy

A new, more resilient strain of trader has emerged from the great purge. Experienced flow traders are being sought everywhere from Morgan Stanley to UBS, Barclays Capital, Nomura, Evolution, Icap, and RBS.

Traders' resurgence accompanies increased appetite for risk. Goldman VaR reached an all time high in Q2. Morgan Stanley, which sought to pare back risk taking, is rushing to hire up to 400 traders and salespeople in an effort to make amends.

3) Boutiques and investment bankers are not yet sexy

After Lehman went under, life was all about reducing risks and leveraging relationships. As noted in point two, this didn't last.

With the exception of very senior figures, the relationship hiring scene remains muted. This is particularly so for juniors in M&A (who don't have real relationships anyway) and is because M&A has yet to recover from its post-Lehman dive.

4) Spawn of Lehman are distorting the hiring market

Having acquired elements of Lehman Brothers, BarCap and Nomura are racing to convert their more and less substantial scraps of Fuld's empire into full coverage global investment banks. Perversely, this is fuelling hiring across the market.

5) Post-Lehman options are distorting the hiring market

As we pointed out a while ago, stock options issued in the wake of Lehman's collapse are now very lucrative.

Hiring someone in possession of these options requires a costly buyout. Thanks to Lehman, recruitment is therefore more expensive than it would otherwise have been.

6) Banking is still the place to be, providing you're in it

If you survived the past 12 months and are still employed in banking, 2009 should prove a lucrative year. If you didn't survive, it's a different story.

Although banks are now hiring again, there are still around two new job seekers to every new job. And a recent report commissioned by the City of London predicted that big hiring won't return to London's financial services industry until 2013. Even then, it says there will be 10,000 fewer roles than there were in 2008.