Irish banks are hiring graduates again
The three-year graduate recruitment hiatus within Ireland's domestic banks is over. Well, kind of.
Bank of Ireland has formally restarted its graduate programme again this year, in Dublin, Belfast and London, while we understand that AIB has been hiring under the radar for its capital markets division.
BoI is still hiring grads and tells us that the numbers it plans to employ haven't "bottomed out", while sources suggest that AIB is planning to take on around 60 graduates for its capital markets division. The latter, however, is not a formal programme and AIB has secured the services of various recruitment firms to scour for graduate talent.
AIB tells us that it aims to recruit for roles internally wherever possible, but occasionally has to look externally if that skill-set is not available in-house.
It may seem slightly strange that Bank of Ireland is recruiting graduates again after a three-year hiring freeze, particularly after the 750 redundancies announced last year and ongoing restructuring at the firm.
However, there's more radical downsizing going on at AIB, which announced it was to make around 2,000 redundancies last month. What's more, the government is forcing it to be more domestically-focused, and a lot of the capital markets functions - particularly trading - are international in nature.
Sources suggest that most graduates are going into corporate banking (transaction banking, in particular) and treasury and that trading is not a target for junior recruitment.
The motivation for this is that the last time AIB carried out any sort of graduate recruitment was in 2008, and many of these people have moved on to pastures new.
"Many of these juniors haven't had a pay rise for over three years, yet are worth €15-20k more than their current salary on the market," suggests one source. "They were among the first to switch to contract workout roles, but others have simply moved on to London, Australia and the US."
