Remember 2007? There are supposedly more middle office jobs available now than there were then
2007. Ok, a few Bear Stearns hedge funds went awry early on and by late August presentiments of badness were mounting, but mostly it was a good year. Mostly, 2007 can be held up as an example of what life was like BC (before crisis).
It seems significant, therefore, that one recruiter thinks there were more middle office job vacancies available in Q2 and Q3 of 2010 than there were three years' ago.
The revelation, presented in graphical form below for those who can see it, comes from recruitment firm Ambition. They say that middle office hiring over the past two quarters was up 260% on its nadir of Q109.
Source: Ambition
According to Ambition, all this hiring has been driven by fixed income currency and commodities (FICC) businesses. In their own words:
"Expansion within the Interest Rates, Structured Rates and Structured Credit markets over the course of 2010 has driven many City institutions' hiring activity. Candidates with Interest Rates, CDS and CDO product experience in important roles such as project management, performance analysis, back office, risk and compliance, finance departments and marketing teams are in particular demand. "
Drizzling on the parade
Unfortunately, however, FICC revenues are not looking good. After a great year in 2009, they are now in serious remission, as this graph (for the benefit of anyone for whom Flickr isn't firewalled) shows.
Source: JPMorgan
Any FICC driven mega-increase in middle office jobs may therefore prove transitory.
Richard Booty, a director at Huxley Associates, says middle office hiring has definitely been big this year, but that's partly because of all the pent up movement from 2008 and 2009: "There was a lot of churn in the market which we won't get again," he muses.
"We won't see exceptionally high levels of hiring in 2011," Booty predicts. "But we will see stability."
The head of recruitment at one US bank in the City says middle office recruitment in 2011 will be adversely affected by declining revenues, but positively affected by strategic engineering and regulatory change. "2010 has simply seen a normalisation of demand," he adds, ruminatively.
