Those new depressing stats regarding banks' graduate hiring intentions may well be wrong

When High Fliers released the results to their annual survey of graduate hiring intentions last week, they showed that investment banks were planning to hire 37% more people this year than last year (even if the number of applications did still vastly outweigh the number of jobs).

This week, however, the Association of Graduate Recruiters has come out with its own stats and they're not as cheering: it thinks that investment banks and fund managers combined are reducing the number of graduates they're hiring in 2010 by 9%.

Source: AGR

The reason for the anomaly isn't immediately clear, but based on what we've been hearing from banks, High Fliers' figures appear more accurate.

Martin Birchall of High Fliers declares himself mystified by the discrepancy. "We interviewed 10 banks and AGR covered 12. 9 of those organisations were identical, and when we asked them they were increasing their hiring by more than one third," he tells us.

"There wasn't a single investment bank in our latest survey which said graduate hiring numbers had gone down," Birchall adds.

More promisingly, the AGR thinks investment banks still pay the highest starting salaries, although at a median of 38k, this is also lower than the 42k cited by High Fliers.

Source: AGR