City hiring market gets summer surge
CITY recruitment underwent a laesummer surge in August, according to research from financial services recruitment firm Astbury Martin.
The company said the number of new City job vacancies created in August jumped 5,031, up seven per cent from July’s 4,713.
The figure was also up 21 per cent on the number of new City jobs created in August of 2009, at the start of the recent boom in City hiring. Significantly, fund managers, which usually start to recruit later in a market recovery than either capital markets or corporate finance teams, were also now beginning to create new positions, suggesting they had more confidence in the global economic recovery than previously.
Mark Cameron, chief operating officer at Astbury Marsden, said investment banks had taken a mid-summer pause to reshape some of their teams but were now hiring again.
He said: “Institutions have to fight a lot harder to get the staff they want compared to a year ago and employees are fairly certain to get at least a 15 per cent pay rise in exchange for the risk of moving employer.”
“Whilst the IPO pipeline has been much weaker than many institutions had hoped, the debt markets have remained very active right from sovereign bonds through to high yield debt.”
Stephan Williams, director of City recruitment firm Empiric Solutions backed up the findings, saying: “There has definitely been an increase in confidence and in the speed with which candidates are being snapped up. September, October and November tend to be strong months anyway but there has also definitely been an upturn in the volume of jobs on offer.”