GUEST COMMENT: Please don't come complaining to me that you can't find a job in this market

When Lehman went, I really thought it was the end. A friend of mine was in the now-infamous town hall where the bad news was relayed to Lehman's Canary Wharf-based employees. Redundancy contracts were handed out to everyone by HR as soon as they walked into the room. He called me soon afterwards and told me, "that's it, the party's over. The City as we know it will be dead in two years."

It turns out he's wrong (he works at a hedge fund now). Given the steady pace of interviews I've been to in the last three months (nine firms and counting) this is clearly not the case. But why am I getting interviewed when the market isn't great?

Both my experiences and a quick straw poll of my friends and peers suggest the following:

1) People are moving into niche areas

This is particularly the case in banking.

Prime brokerage is a good example. It's an area which has actually benefitted from the crisis. After Lehman blew up hedge funds wanted to spread their capital around and this broke the duopoly of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

2) Regulation is driving employment

Increasing regulation is another driver which, as a direct result of the crisis, is creating opportunities.

I know people who've moved into lucrative jobs in consultancies specialising in the new capital adequacy rules.

3) Exhumation is driving employment

The very same people who helped create the credit boom by structuring, trading and selling the now-toxic assets are employed on the buyside. They know where the skeletons are buried, so who better to dig them up and assess the viability of bringing them back to life?

Some of these people have set up their own firms to do this. Others are employed by hedge funds and private equity funds specialising in the distressed sector.

4) Smaller firms are hiring

I know several friends who've gone to work for stat-ups and boutiques. Generally, however, these smaller firms are paying badly, particularly when it comes to salaries (meaning they have lower fixed costs, which is why they're still able to hire). For this reason, you may not want to work for them.

5) Some people are even moving to Asia

There are jobs in Asia. Moving there is not easy, but nor is it impossible - as long as you go for an internal transfer. A friend of mine, working in bulge bracket M&A, moved to the Hong Kong office a few years ago and has never looked back.

As the Chinese market goes from strength to strength, he's been kept busy with a string of mandates. Even non-Asian companies want to list on the Hong Kong exchange. He's a likeable chap, but was no rock star when he was in London and before relocating he'd had nearly three years of pitching without any deals been closed. Life in Asia seems monumentally preferable and he's just been promoted.

6) Some people are moving to Asia-focused banks in London

Another way to trade the same theme is to join an Asian bank in London. StanChart, HSBC, even (as noted recently on this site: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-27/bocom-to-narrow-the-gap-in-pay-with-foreign-investment-banks.html) BoCom, part of China's fifth-largest lender, have been expanding here.

Another friend of mine moved from an American investment bank to an Asian bank's London office. She's happy, but according to her, the trade-off is that you'll obviously never be in the head office. However that might not matter since the real power lies, for the time being, in London. It's where the deals get closed, particularly due to its strength in the natural resources sector.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that the jobs are out there - if you know where to look for them and are prepared to make the effort.

The author has worked in various roles across banking and asset management