This is why you couldn't find a banking job last year

If you were looking for a banking job in London last year, and you couldn't find one, it was obviously the pandemic stupid. It was also Brexit. And it was the fact that although hiring halved, people kept on looking for jobs.

So says middle and back office recruitment firm Morgan McKinley. In its City Employment Monitor released today, Morgan McKinley says the number of financial services jobs on offer in London declined 50% year-on-year in 2020, to 16,335. However, the number of job-seekers remained stable at around 51,000. 

As a result, Morgan McKinley says there were 3.2 new job seekers to every new job last year. In 2019, there were only 1.6 people chasing each new financial services job.

The implication is that 69% of financial services job seekers in London last year were unsuccessful thanks to the saturated market. With luck, this will change in 2021: Hakan Enver, Managing Director at Morgan McKinley UK said the market showed "resilience and steadiness" towards the end of last year and that, "the financial sector is continuing to hire, and we are seeing a renewed optimism as we head into 2021.”

Front office finance recruiters are optimistic about hiring this year after 2020's bumper sales and trading revenues. Antoine Morgaut, the CEO of recruitment firm Robert Walters' business in Europe and the Americas, says 2021 could be the year that financial services recruitment finally pulls out of its 12-year slump. 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)

Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash