Goodish omen: banks have not stopped hiring internal recruiters
Volatility, falling volumes and Irish debt trauma are not discouraging banks from building their internal recruitment teams, even now.
"In HR, most of the hiring takes place between April and November," says Nicole Brooke, head of the human resources practice at Pemberton Search. "The market picked up this summer and we're placing quite a few internal recruitment managers.
"It's hopefully an indication that the hiring market is going to pick up next year," she adds.
Among the recruiters is said to be RBS global banking and markets, which already has a big internal recruiting team and hired Jim Richardson from Credit Suisse to manage its recruitment requirements earlier this year. Equally, Lloyds has just hired Mark Gilbertson to take control of its hiring needs.
Less promisingly, Victoria Walmsley, operations director at Morgan McKinley, says most of the internal recruiter recruitment now taking place in banks has absolutely nothing to do with the front office.
"In the first half of the year, a number of banks were hiring in significant volumes for their internal recruitment teams, particularly for front office recruiters," she says. "Now that the majority of those positions have been filled, the hiring that is occurring in this space is generally for middle and back office recruiters as well as graduate recruiter roles."
There are signs that graduate recruiters are particularly hard to come by. One newly appointed head of graduate recruitment this week who confessed she hadn't worked in banking before and didn't have a clue she was doing.
