The harsh new reality of the Irish financial services hiring landscape
This is slightly strange; despite an increase in financial services vacancies of around 35% on this time last year, there's been a sharp drop in the number of candidates looking for work.
The reason for this seems to be that financial services firms in Ireland are looking after those people they want to keep in areas where demand is picking up.
The latest Morgan McKinley Irish employment monitor shows a 36% upswing in new financial services vacancies on this point in 2010. But, the number of new candidates has dropped sharply - from around 15,000 in February 2010 to nearly 6,400 this year.
"Many companies promised bonuses this year so there is less movement in the market than normal - we expect the number of new professional job seekers to increase in Q2," says Matt Doyle, consultant, financial services at Morgan McKinley in Ireland.
Bonuses? Yes indeed. Areas like fund administration (where demand is high) are paying them, international banks never stopped paying them and, even outside of the tactics pursued by Bank of Ireland, domestic institutions are paying them.
How is this possible? Quite simple - much of the recruitment in domestic banks has been for loan workout specialists. These people are both in demand and employed on a long-term contract-basis of between 18 months to two years. To ensure they don't switch jobs before the contract ends, banks are having to offer incentives.
"If it's coming towards the last six months of a contract, banks are offering completion bonuses of up to 15% of annual salary to ensure workout specialists won't leave," says Jennifer Ward, manager of banking and finance at Sigmar Recruitment.
Unfortunately, the harsh reality of the new Irish financial services recruitment landscape seems to be that in areas where there's a skills shortage, people are being incentivised to stay. But, at the same time, there's an excess of candidates and no jobs on offer for those being made redundant.
"Corporate banking, risk and compliance, corporate restructuring, fund administration and insurance are all areas where companies are working hard to keep hold of talent," says Ken Harbourne, director of recruiters Wallace Myer. "Unfortunately, with some heavy redundancies expected in retail banking there are simply no jobs for these people to go into."
