Permanent recruitment within the investment banking and investment management sectors is beginning to pick up. But how are institutions coping, and what can other banking and financial services organisations learn from them?
After a year of redundancies, restructuring and natural staff turnover, headcount freezes in the City have been removed from a number of institutions, including many of the leading investment banks. In addition, the trend for job interviews seen in Q1 has finally progressed to job offers this quarter.
With cost management still at the forefront of organisations’ minds, the first option for hiring managers has been to tap into their existing network of contacts, using personal recommendations and the pool of unemployed candidates knocking directly at their door.
Employers would do well to heed the lessons of current recruiters now, in anticipation of the upturn
While this can be a successful strategy for those who are well connected, for positions that require specialist knowledge or where only the best candidate in the market will do, hiring managers still need to broaden their candidate search to include the wider market.
Direct hiring has obvious cost benefits. However, with competition for live vacancies remaining intense many recruiters are experiencing a significant problem with inappropriate applicants. According to the quarterly Badenoch & Clark Employment Study, almost one in five (19%) job hunters are applying for roles without doing any research into the employer or their own suitability.
Where recruitment desks have been downsized, institutions often don’t have the resource to handle large swathes of applicants either, leading to time management issues.
But the largest risk posed by relying on an internal and direct hiring process alone is that it can limit the quality of talent considered. Very strong candidates, if they have a current position of security, will not be actively applying for new roles. This is where recruiters and recruitment partners with in-depth relationships across the market come into their own, by facilitating introductions to passive job seekers.
The investment management industry is still getting to grips with significant reductions of assets under management and recruitment volumes are expected to pick up further as the market settles into its new reality. Employers would do well to heed the lessons of current recruiters now, in anticipation of this upturn.
