Irish graduates now face competition from experienced financial services professionals

Graduates looking to break into financial services in Ireland are not just facing competition from one another, but from people with up to one year's industry experience.

The good news for graduates is that more financial services firms in Ireland are recruiting juniors again. Most of the fund servicing firms have been on the milkrounds this year, domestic banks have recruited limited numbers and international investment banks have been touring Irish universities for potential recruits.

However, more financial services organisations have been employing the services of recruitment agencies to fill graduate roles. Very often, this means that it's not just inexperienced graduates applying, but also recent entries to the industry who may have fallen victim to one of the many redundancy announcements within the Irish financial services industry.

"We're sending both the CVs of fresh graduates and those of people with around a year's experience and, by and large, clients are choosing the people with experience," says one recruiter who recently worked on a graduate role. "This obviously makes it even tougher for new graduates to secure a job."

However, perhaps it's not as straightforward as this.

Sean Gannon, director of the careers advisory centre at Trinity College Dublin agrees that large redundancy announcements at insurers like Aviva and the domestic banks have meant more competition for graduates looking to financial service roles, but says there's another reason firms are using recruitment agencies.

"To many final year students here, the prospect of working for certain financial services organisations - some of the domestic banks, for example - is not an attractive proposition," he says. "These employers are using headhunters because their public profile isn't very positive, and it helps if a third-party is doing the recruitment for them."

In fact, this year graduates have more options available to them, he says. The Big Four accountancy firms have been winning more restructuring work from the large banks, which means they've increased their graduate intake, fund administrators are relatively voluminous recruiters of graduates, the Central Bank of Ireland and NAMA have been hiring, while a limited proportion of students are looking at overseas opportunities.

"Around 10-12% of our students have moved overseas, which is on a par with previous years," he says. "The UK is still the most popular destination, but the US and other EU countries offer appealing opportunities for financial services careers."