Why you can't find a new banking job in London: a chart

If you're struggling to find a new banking job in London, you might be inclined to blame the EU referendum.  The complex perils of a Brexit are certainly discouraging banks from hiring, but they're not the only thing inhibiting your job search: there's also the fact that London is awash with financial services job seekers who don't have jobs to go to.

The chart below illustrates the extent of the problem.

Between January 2016 and May 2016, recruitment firm Morgan McKinley estimates that 74,274 new people started looking for finance jobs in London. Over the same period, it estimates that 40,486 new jobs became available.

In other words, in the past six months alone, there were 33,788 more new financial services jobseekers in London than there were jobs to fill them.

It gets worse. Morgan McKinley's figures suggest there was also a shortfall of 24,000 jobs to candidates in the second half of 2015.  The cumulative shortfall for the last 12 months is therefore as high as 61,000. That's a lot of people sloshing about, chasing new jobs as they come onto the market.

Are things really this bad? They might seem so if you're looking for a job without success. In reality, some of those new job seekers are likely to have decided to stick with the jobs they've got, while others will have gone off to do something entirely different or returned to their home markets.  Still, that's a lot of disaffected job seekers in need of dissipation; now is probably not the time to find yourself unemployed.

Photo credit: crowds by Dieter Drescher is licensed under CC BY 2.0.b