If you want to find a new job you will need to massively reduce your compensation expectations
Are you looking for a new job? Are you hoping to receive a little compensatory uplift when you find it? Are you also hoping that this uplift will be based not on last year's pay package (which was lower than usual and therefore clearly a weird anomaly) but on what you received for 2009/2010?
You are deluded.
Recruiters say candidates' pay expectations are absurdly high. These delusional notions of market value are preventing people from getting hired.
"We've been trying to move someone who was paid 200k last year and 350k the year before, but who wants 400k to move into a new job," says one headhunter. "People want a premium, but they are not being realistic about it."
This lack of realism is pervading everything.
"I'm trying to move a guy who was paid 975k for 2010. For 2009 and 2008 he was paid 1.2m. The client's offering him 975k on the grounds that bonuses are going to be down 20% this year, but he won't accept," another headhunter complained to us last week.
If you intend to get hired into a front office role in the second half of 2011, you must therefore cultivate pragmatism.
Sales and trading revenues especially are down substantially this year. Goldman Sachs is shifting jobs to Singapore because it's cheaper there. Redundancies are happening.
Are you going to get hired in London if you insist on earning more than you did in 2009? No.
On the other hand, are you willing to take a risk and move into a job you don't know very much about for less than 20% guaranteed financial upside? No.
You must therefore content yourself with staying in your current job until one of two things happens: either the market will pick up and someone will pay you what you require to move into a new position; or the market won't pick up, there will be more redundancies and you will be coerced into adjusting your pay expectations downwards horribly.
The choice is yours. Let us know what you think is most rational in the circumstances - bearing in mind that real disposable incomes in the UK are currently falling anyway.
