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Recently a headhunter approached a member of the fixed-income department of a leading international bank to try to recruit him for a rival. The candidate, intrigued by the sound of the job, decided to pursue the matter. But it soon turned out that the hiring bank was the very one he had walked out of just months before.
The recruitment business is awash with such embarrassing tales of confusion between banks' business line managers, their own human resources departments and external headhunters.
Recruitment firms are suffering from the general downturn in banking. But there are still bright spots - notably fixed income. These days, hiring the right staff is a serious business. Gone are the boom days when banks needed new bodies to flesh out high ambitions. Now, with mass redundancies, new recruitment has to be guaranteed to boost the bottom line. And the process should be diligent and discreet enough to protect a hiring bank's reputation.
In response, banks need to get a lot more sophisticated and tactical about how they recruit. The hitch is that this is happening when many HR departments are slashing recruitment budgets and the recruitment process is often rather inefficient and disorganised.
External recruiters cite a lack of communication between business heads and HR about precise needs. The recruitment business itself is being reshaped by uncertainty across banking. Recruiters see a tendency to favour global generalist search firms or in-house expertise over small specialist boutiques. When ever more technical front-office staff are needed, that might be the wrong approach.
The recruitment industry faces contraction. Banks that until recently may have had 10 or 15 external recruitment firms on their calling list now tend to have no more than five preferred suppliers, including one or two on long-term retainers. If a recruiter is not on the list, they don't get the business. "Each part of the business has a different list and there are four firms on our panel," says a syndicate head. "We have one global firm we invite to bid for any research, search or advisory work. The other three can bid and are selected on the basis of performance."
Some specialist boutiques complain that under this system they are increasingly getting shut out, as banks keep the...