GUEST COMMENT: Internal mobility schemes are mostly an opportunity to place people in roles that can't be filled any other way

One of the more heinous aspects of the Global Financial Crisis has been the rise of “Internal Recruitment” by investment banks.

I’m not in HR or recruitment consulting, I’ve been a front office banker my whole career, but it seems to me that internal HR divisions have been set up to shunt burnt-out front office bankers into less glamorous middle and back office roles they’d have never considered in the past.

The seeds of this have been in place for a while now. There were those posters above the photocopiers promising a £1,000 bonus to anyone who brought across a friend from another bank. It was all part of a trend to reduce recruiting costs (read: cut out recruitment consultants).

Now that bank profits are falling, cost-cutting initiatives have become imperative. Banks are legally obliged to look for alternative roles for people they’re letting go and shifting people into these roles makes good sense. The firm gets someone with a front-office work ethic, in a cost-centre area, working twice as hard as the last person who had that job.

It makes sense for exhausted bankers too. When you haven’t slept properly in weeks and your man paunch is getting out of control, the internal mobility scheme can seem a painless way of moving into a new role without actually having to look for one.  The only danger is that you may get stuck in it.

The author works as an investment banker and would prefer to remain unnamed.