The great non-hiring of 2011
2010 was a big year for hiring. In 2010, the combination of Barclays Capital, UBS, Deutsche, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan alone, added 10,780 people, increasing their collective headcount by 14%.
2011, by comparison, is looking as moribund as a courgette.
"There's a push in demand in some areas," says Jonathan Nicholson, managing director at recruiters Astbury Marsden. "But in terms of volume, it's nothing compared to where we were a year ago. This is certainly not the explosion in recruitment we had in 2010."
Heads of recruitment at investment banks in the City concur that it's all a bit quiescent.
"We had big plans, but the revenues aren't there so we aren't going to be able to follow them through," says one. "We were talking about doing x; now we're doing x minus 50%."
"Last year, there was a lot of pent up demand and a lot of reengineering going on in terms of technology infrastructure," says another. "This year will be more about targeted expansion."
Areas where expansion is most likely to be targeted include: Asia; the middle office (technology and finance) and corporate banking.
Areas where there probably really won't be much targeting at all include: fixed income currencies and commodities. As analysts at Evolution Securities point out in a note this morning, under Basel III, returns on equity in FICC businesses are likely to fall to less than 10%. To overcome this, they suggest banks like UBS might want to trim their FICC businesses by around 30%.
If first quarter revenues pick up, maybe there'll be a bit more hiring in Q2. For the moment, however, Nicholson says it's mostly one in one out. "People are saying, 'We're staffed ok and need to see some improvement in revenues," he tells us.
