It is no longer considered cool to have only one job offer

This time last year, anyone with a single job offer was the jobseeker equivalent of a fusion between Lady Gaga and Wolfgang Schaeuble: deeply cool, and clearly in demand.

Nowadays, however, candidates with a single offer are more akin to George Papandreou: slightly desperate and not entirely in control of their own destinies.

This is because multiple job offers have officially made a comeback. According to the Financial Times, recruitment Michael Page is experiencing more

of them. According to our own research, most other recruiters are experiencing them too.

"It's the bus syndrome," says Jim Nairn, a director at recruitment firm the Cornell Partnership. "We had one candidate who'd been out of the market for 12 months and who suddenly received three offers."

"I had one candidate who'd been out of the market for 12 months and who suddenly received two offers on the same day," says Simon Lindrea, a director at Michael Page Financial Services.

For favoured candidates, two job offers are now common, three job offers are fairly normal, and three job offers plus a buyback from an existing employer are not unheard of.

"We had a candidate last week who wasn't particularly senior, but who was offered a 15-20% increase in salary to stay with his current employer," Lindrea says.

The source of multiple offers

Clearly, the return of multiple offers has got something to do with resurgent hiring. "Banks have been cautious on hiring spend for the past 12 months and are now all chasing high quality candidates," says Lindrea.

Belinda Martin at Joslin Rowe says they're also related to strong demand and weak supply: the best candidates are coming onto the market only slowly, she says.

James Heath of recruitment firm Greenwich Partners says multiple offers are a function of multiple interviews: "We're coming across people who are interviewing with 8 or 9 different private equity funds and banks."

And Nairn says they've got something to do with psychology: "If an organisation finds out that you're doing well elsewhere, they're more likely to take an interest in you."

Where does this leave the people with no offers at all? Should they be fabricating an offer or two to increase their appeal? "No," says Nairn. "People do sometimes pretend they've got an offer from elsewhere and it often backfires, particularly if their other 'offer' relates to a position that we're dealing with."

Where the multiple offers are

You're most likely to receive multiple offers if you have the good fortune to be a candidate in a 'hot' area. According to recruiters, such candidates include:

· Experienced corporate finance analysts and associates in investment banks

· Associates in private equity funds

· Experienced corporate finance analysts and associates in boutiques

· Anyone with change and project management experience

· Product controllers

· Newly qualified accountants with impeccable academics who want to become product controllers or financial controllers (base salaries have risen to 62.5k in some cases according to Andrew Hanson at Robert Walters)

· Anyone with regulatory risk expertise