EDITOR'S TAKE: The secret hiring plan at RBS
Imagine that you are a state owned British bank. Imagine too, that after a long while hoping that you might be permitted to return to private ownership like your American counterpart, you find that plans to sell the British government's 83% stake have been put on hold for at least 18 months. And then imagine that a key member of the new government actually wants to keep you in public ownership for at least a decade, and that great opprobrium is being heaped on any civil servant earning more than 142k a year.
If you were that British bank, how would you hire anyone? And in particular, how would you hire anyone earning more than 142k a year, who would undoubtedly want to extract a premium for the pleasure of working for the state?
This, we suspect, is RBS's dilemma.
Having lost 'a thousand top bankers' in 2009, it doesn't seem to have moved especially fast to replace them in 2010. So far, there's been a bit of equity research hiring and the promise of some 'aggressive' hiring in risk, but that's about it.
RBS didn't immediately return a call enquiring about its hiring intentions this year, but we suspect it has devised a cunning(ish) plan to deal with its hiring conundrum: bring in lots of fresh graduates instead.
As we are reporting on our student centre this week, and as we first reported in January, RBS is more than doubling the number of interns it's hiring for its global banking and markets division in 2010: it's bringing in 261 instead of the 115 it had in 2009, and it intends to convert 80% of them into full time hires (the same proportion as last year).
Is RBS trying to rebuild its investment bank from the bottom up? Maybe.
One senior insider says the strategy does go a little like this. However, he also says that RBS is 'having conversations with' some surprisingly senior hires, that the rising share price is a draw, and that the bank is actually paying quite well. Maybe the additional graduate recruitment is simply a hedge in case RBS's generosity becomes known to Vince Cable.
