Morning Coffee: The roaring recruitment market where 27-year-olds get $50k for referring friends. Female Barclays' VP stereotyped as unambitious

Now that most banks are offering fewer jobs and that those jobs are flooded with applicants, there's less need for to pay existing staff to refer their friends. However, one area of the London recruitment market still needs this crutch: law.

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In the legal recruitment market, the Financial Times reports that junior lawyers, typically in their late 20s, are being paid as much as $50k (£65k) when they successfully refer friends for jobs. The generosity comes amidst a legal recruitment boom driven by US firms like Kirkland & Ellis which has also resulted in big salary increases as UK firms struggle to keep up with their more generous US rivals. 

Nor is it only associate lawyers that might like to refer talented comrades. The FT also notes that US firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is hiring wildly in London and Europe. Its headcount has gone from 20 people in the UK last August to 190 in London and Brussels now. Many of those new additions are senior, including - latterly - David Holdsworth, the former general counsel for private equity firm TDR Capital. 

Holdsworth might want to advocate for his close acquaintances, but they will need to be very special. Neel Sachdev, co-head of Paul Weiss’s London office, said the firm is hiring and promoting, "a group of the most elite partners in London and Brussels."

There is some concern, however, that all the focus on finding friends and earning $50k might detract from doing of work. “Providing internal referrals to earn the $50,000 bonus takes a lot of time out of a billing associate’s day, and just because they referred their friends doesn’t mean the friends will join,” one legal headhunter told the FT. Fortunately, this won't be an issue at UK legal firms, some of which are only offering £5k to staff who provide a similar service. 

Separately, a Barclays VP working as a 'global tax operations risk and control officer' has won a discrimination case against the bank after it was found that her boss wrongly assumed she wasn't interested in a promotion because of family issues. 

Nazia Lawrence's close family members reportedly suffered health issues in 2021. She told her boss, Mark Bell, that she could not 'focus on or prioritise going for promotion at that time because of the pressing personal issues she was dealing with'. 

Lawrence reportedly intended this to mean that she wouldn't be able to apply and look for vacancies, not that she wasn't actually interested in a promotion. Lawrence, however, took it to mean that she didn't want to be promoted beyond VP. When the opportunity for an internal promotion to director came up, he gave it to a high performing male colleague instead. And when Lawrence complained at a subsequent appraisal meeting, Bell suggested he thought she was happy as a VP, said Lawrence wasn't much good at taking feedback and reflected she 'just wanted the glory for good work'.

An employment tribunal found that Bell probably wouldn't have made those assumptions about a male colleague. Lawrence's temporary caring responsibilities had been wrongly conflated with "no longer desiring promotion," said the ruling in favour of Lawrence. 'We find this change to have been based on assumptions about caring responsibilities taking over, subsuming the female carer for the long term...It turns [her] from an ambitious, promotion-seeking individual with high potential to a colleague who is just happy to remain a VP."

Notably, Lawrence was also told that Barclays didn't have many promotional opportunities in London because the bank was cutting costs and avoiding the creation of jobs in 'high cost locations.'

Meanwhile... 

Goldman Sachs' new CTO, John Madsen, has a degree in philosophy. (Business Insider) 

A federal judge ruled the US Federal Trade Commission can’t enforce its near-total ban on noncompete agreements that was set to go into effect next month. (Bloomberg) 

About 40% of Morgan Stanley’s sales and trading summer interns in Europe, Africa and the Middle East last year came candidates trained by simulation provider AmplifyME. (Bloomberg) 

Kim Henriksson, CFO of Swedish investment firm EQT AB is moving to New York to drive international growth. EQT wants to expand private wealth initiatives and engage more with US capital markets. (Bloomberg) 

Binance is hiring 1,000 people and many of them are in compliance. (Bloomberg) 

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