Fewer redundancies, but it's far harder to find a job

Using the admittedly nubilous tool of high-level statistics provided by accountancy firms and recruiters, it's possible to reach two conclusions about the state of the London financial services job market.

1) If you're in employment, you're less likely to be made redundant than this time last year.

2) If you're looking for a job, it's a lot harder to find one.

Quarterly figures unleashed today by the CBI and PricewaterhouseCoopers suggest that redundancies in 'securities trading' will be less extreme than in the final months of 2009 (when there weren't many redundancies anyway). This runs counter to recent dire trading results, but is hopefully true if you're working in a markets business. Specifically, in September 2009, the CBI's index on optimism about employment in securities trading for the next three months, stood at -70%; this year, it's +7%.

Unfortunately, the latest figures from the monthly recruiter-research-dynamo that is Morgan McKinley aren't as welcome. They continue to show that the discrepancy between the number of new job seekers and the number of new jobs has broadened to a chasm this year. In August 2009 there were 2,552 more new jobseekers than new jobs; in August 2010 there were 5,266.