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Date Posted: 05/09/2024
Speed read
•UK Market sentiment improving, political stability
•Pockets of aggressive Front Office hiring
•Uptick in demand for Data Science / Engineering talent
•Real investment in AI/ML projects
2024 H1 Overview
H1 saw the market finally emerge from Spring 2023’s downturn after almost 12 months of significantly subdued demand. Q2 in particular saw demand go from strength-to-strength with green shoots abound across different individual clients, business lines and skill disciplines.
The major issues of getting costs under control (following 2022’s COVID rebound), and major macroeconomic uncertainty, which strangled demand in 2023, seem both to have settled and Q2 has seen a high volume of clients return to the market and a general sense of ambition across the piece.
Interestingly, we have seen only pockets of hiring across our larger / Tier One clients but with the majority of institutions predicting a significant uptick in Q3/Q4. Those pockets have generally been demanding small team builds across e-Trading, Algo and Quant Dev FICC teams. Elsewhere, wholesale adjustments to spend have naturally taken longer to manifest themselves at the larger institutions and, on those hiring initiatives which have been approved, direct recruitment functions were usually able to take advantage of the low-hanging fruit of a strong candidate market at the time. We are anticipating a busy remainder of 2024 across these firms.
Smaller and mid-tier institutions accounted for the majority of the increased volume over the half-year as requests to bolster teams and initiatives were rapidly approved. This included an uptick from a number of traditional Asset Managers, whilst the Commodities trading organisations kept up their demand (albeit there have been some significant scale-backs at the very largest players).
Inevitably the huge demand from the larger Hedge Fund players had to taper-off at some point and this has been a noticeable theme over the past 6 months. Hiring has still been ongoing but evidently more selective. Simultaneously, as suspected in our last report, we have seen some significant rounds of cuts ongoing across these firms and a flow of candidates returning to look for roles away from this space.
More broadly, the widespread, large-scale redundancy programmes seem to be at an end with clients instead very much looking forward at the business-driven priorities around deliverables with most cuts occurring at smaller institutions where business priorities are being realigned.
Talent pools remain relatively strong, albeit we are just starting to see candidate volumes shrinking across some disciplines with a buoyant Q2 having mopped up a proportion of the available / passively looking talent. With the fallout from a mixed comp season having largely settled we anticipate a further shrinking of talent pools over the coming months in many areas.
On the Contract/Temp side, after a very subdued few years, recent months have seen some promising signs of a return to clients looking at the Contract market to help on short-mid-term deliverables. Whilst early days, the combination of higher comp costs on the perm side, settled IR35 positions and tangible ambition with increased budgets across many clients would suggest that this increase in contractor demand will only increase further in the coming months. It will be interesting to see how talent availability is able to mirror this with many career-contractors having moved into permanent positions or out of industry.
Political impact?
The UK has a new Labour government, what does that mean for the employment market as well as the wider economy, and specifically the financial services and tech sectors? The markets have received this positively and Labour have pledged a fiscally responsible approach to economic policy. With a likely closer relationship with Europe, the UK now becomes an attractive place to invest, particularly with less political certainty across Europe and with the US likely to vote in Trump. Although at the time of writing the Democrats look to be closing the gap in the polls.
The new UK government has pledged some significant changes to employment law, the most relevant to these pages, being the reduction in the 2-year qualifying period for unfair dismissal claims. This change in basic individual rights from day 1 also includes parental leave and sick pay. There is likely to be further change, with strengthened rules around “fire and rehire” and potentially a review of probation periods. This is likely in response to employers trying to negate the day 1 exposure with longer and/or tighter probation periods. Will these lead to more contract/temp hiring? Possibly, and this might make employers review their approach to IR35, with a move away from blanket policies
Which skills/roles are in demand?
We have seen a much broader spread of roles this year outside of core engineering hires, including front-end devs. Particular hot spots have been IT/Info Security, Data Science and Engineering, and GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliance). Infrastructure upgrades, Infra as code, Cloud and SRE all featured as well. We’ve seen some significant pressure put on IT Security areas from the regulator, in some cases they have demanded restructures and even new senior hires to be made, particularly across the related GRC areas. Front office trading teams continue to drive headcount across e-Trading, Strats, Quant/Data Science.
In terms of Engineering hires, we have seen more demand at the VP/Director experienced levels, albeit still individual contributors. The most popular stack has been Java and Python, front end hires mostly React. Data engineering continues to grow, the increase in actual spending on AI initiatives being closely linked. There is a marked rise in projects to improve or automate data storage, distribution and/or analysis. Snowflake, Docker and Kubernetes expertise continue to remain popular as firms seeks to improve, automate and modernise both their application and data infrastructure.
AI/ML/Data Science
We are seeing some real investment, and therefore roles, for AI driven projects within various functions across our clients. Perhaps in contrast to previous PR driven AI initiatives which centred mainly around Labs and Incubators. The roles are mainly data engineering or data science where AI is being implemented into production systems across the bank, helping clients with better data analysis and insight or internal process efficiency, automating regulatory requirements, client onboarding etc.
Data driven strategies are now on the agendas for senior management and board level, with non-tech business leaders becoming much more engaged in the outcomes from implementing these technologies. This is leading to a focus on enhanced data insight and automation, therefore the quality of data is ever more important which is influencing spend on cloud and data quality / infra / distribution functions.
Will this continue? There is some scepticism creeping into the levels of AI investment. Goldmans recently commented that they estimate only a quarter of AI exposed tasks will be cost-effective to automate within the next 10 years, with AI impacting less than 5% of all tasks and with a much lower than expected impact on productivity and therefore GDP growth.
What about big tech / FAANG?
In the US we have seen some volatility in the share price of the big tech companies which is impacting their business models. As mentioned above, one issue is the amount of investment, and focus, on AI, and whether this is, or will, translate into higher revenues. Secondly, these firms have traded at valuation premiums in a high rate environment; with rates now anticipated to fall those premiums may go the same way. This has impacted hiring levels and an outflow of talent into SMEs and other sectors looking to invest in Data Science, AI, ML etc. offering more tangible project outcomes. Here we see Fintech firms benefiting with the ability to secure talent who may have been tempted by Meta, Alphabet etc.
5 days in the office?
A few years ago, the prospect of going back to the office 5 days a week would have seemed almost unthinkable, but it is becoming more of a reality with several banks pushing for full attendance. Whilst the majority of firms are still offering a hybrid solution, the parameters are firming up – 3 or 4 days now being the norm. Those still allowing 1/2 days in the office are increasingly the outliers. Albeit anecdotal evidence would suggest there is a gap between official policy and what’s happening on the ground. Most firms are reluctant to put in place more draconian monitoring for fear of legal or reputational risk.
2024 H2 outlook
The conditions in the UK are improving from a macro-economic perspective, with rates likely to be reducing soon and better growth forecast. The new UK government has also been supportive of the tech industry, with pledges for AI policy, autonomous driving legislation and pro-investment policies to strengthen the start-up market. As long as the government doesn’t go too far on changes to employment law and keeps spending within its proposed limits, we should see firms looking to hire and grow.
In the US we need to see how the election in November plays out, and how this impacts the Wall Street firms, but again the US is recording some strong growth figures, and this should in turn benefit the major banks which will influence their appetite for investment.
On a more micro level we see continued spend on infra upgrades, particularly anything around Data, often the foundation of any significant projects in AI & ML. With regulators continuing to influence, we see further hiring for GRC and IT Security roles. We also predict seeing the top tier banks hiring in greater volumes, to date it’s been pockets of hiring, but we see further headcount growth more generally across functions.
In summary we see a market bubbling-up and anticipate demand increasing to good levels throughout the remainder of the year. Company performances across the sector have generally been very strong for several quarters now. With Covid, Brexit and inflation/rate shocks seemingly now in the rear-view mirror and sentiment generally positive around economic stability/ predictability being sustained under the new Labour administration, all indications point towards a buoyant H2 2024 across the market.
Date Posted: 20/02/2024
2023 H2 Overview
Whilst the broader Technology and Engineering landscape has seen sustained hiring across multiple sectors, the picture has not been a pretty one across the Investment Banking space in the latter half of 2023. The softening of the market in early summer following the CS, SVB etc events swiftly manifested itself into a blanket hiring freeze across almost all of the main players.
The redundancy rounds seen in a handful of the bigger US banks in early 2023 were repeated and then became a widespread theme across the market with volumes of redundancies as high as we have seen in our 22-year history. Whilst almost all of the banks initiated redundancy / cost-saving initiatives over this period, there was a notable theme of US Banks making the largest cuts, the well-publicised current re-org at Citi hopefully drawing a line under the biggest redundancy rounds.
The mood music at most of the major players, including the US banks, is generally now more positive, or certainly less negative at least, and we await to see which will be the first movers to take advantage of a rare abundance of talent available currently, at all levels.
We expect this availability of talent to increase only further in the coming weeks as Comp is announced and paid. Early indications are of a poor Comp season with disappointing bonuses and lots of difficult messages needing to be delivered and many talented individuals beginning to consider their options.
In contrast to the Investment Banks and the majority of the bigger traditional Asset Managers, H2 saw sustained hiring continue across many Hedge Funds, Prop Traders and Commodity firms as they look to invest some strong returns in recent years into core proprietary Risk, Data and Trading platforms. The flow of talent across from the banks has continued with the considerably higher comp, usually less bureaucracy and overall tech/quant ambition proving compelling for many of the most talented. However recent weeks and months have seen a small handful of Hedge Funds make swathing cuts to their Technology and Strats functions and we wonder if this may become a more widespread theme in 2024.
Cost-cutting priorities have naturally led to closer scrutiny of contractor populations as well and we have seen a number of initiatives to significantly reduce contractor headcount. Encouragingly this has often been coupled with a message of rebalancing the workforce population into a higher % of permanent members of staff and we anticipate 2024 to be a year where hiring is largely centered on permanent talent. Spend via “Consultancies” has, finally, also come under closer scrutiny with much talk around offboarding usually very expensive, often less-capable, resource onsite which has avoided the usual careful spend analysis which precurses hiring through proper TA mechanisms.
Outside of banking H2 saw continued cuts at most of the FAANG firms, with only modest hiring in the main. This continued in January with redundancy announcements from Google, Twitch and Spotify. Talent has been flowing towards those well-funded, even more contemporary, tech-dependent sectors e.g. Digital health/MedTech, Quantum computing, AI, Automotive/self-driving vehicles etc.
We are seeing increasing enquiries from clients in these sectors looking to take advantage of our top Engineering talent pool.
Which skills are in demand?
Engineering roles still lead the way in terms of overall demand, with Python being the most in demand dev language currently, but Java, C# and front-end tools (particularly React) are still prolific with a steady demand for C++, particularly in the Quant/data AI space. This is mainly focused on Front Office investment, candidates with specific FICC E/Algo Trading build experience remain in demand, as do experienced Quant Devs, this hiring being supplemented by junior-mid level high calibre core Engineering candidates with or without industry experience.
Data engineering experience, and related tools, are increasingly required across a variety of roles, with a marked rise in projects to improve or automate data storage, distribution and/or analysis. Snowflake, Docker and Kubernetes expertise continue to remain popular as firms seeks to improve, automate and modernise both their application and data infrastructure.
There remains some residual demand from mid-size banks and Commodities traders for regulatory project hiring, mainly Business Analysts for re-fit projects. Albeit the market for Project/Programme/Change & Transformation staff remains very low with much of this layer being reduced across our client base and any demand in the market being satisfied by internal mobility.
Cloud/AI/ML
One interesting area has been the rebalancing of Cloud vs on-prem. In recent years there has been a significant drive to push more and more systems / data into the public cloud. A common theme in recent months has been the maturing of these models with a number of clients reversing this trend back to on-prem data centres, referencing increased cloud costs, coupled to improved performance and lower costs of hardware.
What about bonuses?
Lower than last year, potentially +25% down. Even high-profile front office areas seem to be hit with their managers quoting lower overall bonus pools (due to cost cutting) and business/revenue generators being given priority for retention.
Rank promotions and general salary increases also look to be off the table in the main, but we’ll discuss more fully in our next report when we have more data. This could well lead to increased turnover as the market continues to improve.
Hybrid or not
The direction of travel continues to move to more office-based days in the office with some US banks and hedge funds now at 5 days a week. In general, we are seeing 3 days a week as the norm, with fully remote roles now pretty much non-existent in financial services. Perhaps now just the product of start-ups and niche tech firms.
Automotive/AI Tech
There is significant investment in autonomous driving, with advancements in sensors, AI learning and compute power making it possible to create vehicles capable of navigating and making decisions without human intervention.
Government regulations are also changing to allow self-driving cars to test and operate in real life situations. These changes are happening quickly and are forcing automakers to invest in tech companies in the AI/ML space, as well as responding to changing regulations on emissions and safety. This includes not only traditional automakers but also technology companies entering the automotive space, leading to increased innovation and investment. Many automakers are forming strategic partnerships with these technology firms to leverage each other's strengths. These collaborations can accelerate the development and implementation of advanced technologies.
We are seeing significant demand for software engineering (Python, C++) and data science talent from this sector. So far much of the technology has been built by traditional auto suppliers and manufacturers, centred in Germany, Japan and the US, but we are seeing significant demand in the UK and Silicon valley with firms like Cruise, Zoox and Wayve scaling up.
2024 H1 outlook.
2024 looks to be an interesting year ahead. From a macro-economic perspective, the US and UK economies look to be getting inflation under control and the market expects interest rate cuts in Q2 (or earlier), avoiding recession with a “soft landing”.
The downside is the potential political risk, with over 60 countries and nearly 50% of the world’s population voting in general elections this year. In the US and UK, with a potential change of governing parties, this may have some impact. In the US a republican administration has historically been more pro-business, particularly towards Wall Street but also its approach to Silicon Valley and changing legislation governing AI / autonomous driving. Maybe the opposite could be said in the UK with a Labour government but both parties have relatively similar centralist policies.
In finance, Equities, M&A and other primary markets which were quiet last year are now showing signs of green shoots. With redundancy rounds now, hopefully, completed, cost objectives largely achieved, and some business areas having enjoyed a stellar 2023, we predict a slight rebalancing of demand for talent back towards the big sell-side firms moving forwards. Core technology objectives remain as urgent as ever, many teams have been cut to the point where those remaining are over-stretched and merely firefighting and business demand for delivery is becoming intense.
Demand, when it comes, we expect to be focused in similar disciplines and business-areas that were hiring 12 months ago. FICC being prioritised ahead of Equities and Front Office hires being prioritised ahead of downstream functions. Engineering remains top priority, along with Application Infrastructure, Data Scientists/Engineers, Strats and E-Trading experts.
In the Fintech and tech start-up market funding flows seems to be improving, with valuations finding more equilibrium. Tech talent pools will continue to show even more mobility across sectors, with outflows from FAANG and financial services into those emerging sectors / firms highlighted earlier.
Date Posted: 19/09/2023
Speed read
• Demand down but some areas remain robust
• Short term hiring pauses evident
• Contract demand increasing
• Push for 3+ days in the office
• Continued bank redundancies
H1 Overview
2022 was an exceptionally busy year, demand was high following the Covid years and there were a number of factors influencing the low supply of talent (we won’t go into detail here as we have already discussed last year). We saw big salary increases, bidding wars and bonus buyouts, not to mention aggressive counter-offers. But what about this year? Well, we saw strong deal activity in Q1, perhaps contributed in part by 2022 vacancies and headcount, but also a good flow of new requirements, albeit that has become significantly reduced since the Credit Suisse / SVB problems and as we move towards the holiday season.
We have seen a slight lengthening of placement processes (away from the business-critical front office Tech and Strat hires) with less urgency and more restraint on offers. Whilst counter-offers are commonplace in our market we are seeing less aggressive increases. One reason is that many firms have less headroom with the cost-of-living salary increases already baked in from 2022. Whilst candidates still have multiple offers, timelines aren’t always in sync and
competing firms are now perhaps more reluctant to rush through processes and offers.
Whilst the backdrop of the employment market is one of candidate shortages and recent figures (Feb to April) showed there were still over one million vacancies, the market has certainly shown signs of cooling in Q2. In part due to significant events including the failure of SVB and First Republic in the US, followed by the rapid UBS/CS acquisition. Whilst this rocked the sector for a few weeks, and perhaps ignited some retrenching, we did see demand recover once the markets settled. Hiring volumes remain lower but key projects remain priorities and need staffing. Commodity trading/supply sectors remain buoyed from strong results and continue to invest in tech infrastructure. Other key front office areas continuing to enjoy strong trading performances include Rates and FX where commitment to programmes kicked off in 2021/2 remains strong and the war for talent intense. We continue to see some demand within regulation, both new and remediation.
Interest rate volatility has led to some very strong trading results across our Global Markets clients, feeding into significant tech investment, it has also led to a significant reduction in M&A / Advisory fees elsewhere in our clients which would seem to perhaps have begun to put the brakes on sustained hiring across organisations and a higher focus on costs. This, as well as some missteps in other business areas across our banking clients (retail offerings, consumer credit etc), has led to this cooling-off in much of the market and contributed to some significant rounds of redundancies.
What about redundancies?
Several top tier banks have made redundancies, which have been well reported. We have been involved with a number of these programmes through one of our outplacement partners. Whilst there is no getting away from the significant number of redundancies we would add some context to the headlines. Many of the candidates have been at a senior level and in many cases are the result of business re-orgs or ongoing rationalizing across the bank. It is also worth noting that few or no exit programmes were actioned throughout Covid, so since 2019 perhaps some of the annual attrition has aggregated over 2-3 years.
We are seeing ongoing headcount reductions in the tech space, mainly in response to poorer revenue and higher salary costs. Some fintech firms are under pressure from investors to cut costs and get to break-even/profit points, we see this leading to funding cuts and unfortunately company failures. Whilst the more established “winners” in the space are securing further investment, and continue to grow.
Further headcount “pauses”
Call it a headcount freeze, a reflection or a pause but many firms are taking stock of headcount, with line managers needing to sell the case for priority hires. So far these have not been hard freezes with key hires still progressing. This is also not universal across the market, focused mainly on the top tier banks, and particularly those that hired in numbers last year.
Talking to senior tech leaders there is pressure to get stuff done, whether replacing older trading platforms, new regulatory demands, or infrastructure driven
improvements. Cloud migrations, IT security, data improvements all quoted as critical programmes of work. How these demand pressures influence immediate hiring plans is yet to be seen.
Are salaries and rates now stabilising?
In our last report we talked about c.20-30% salary increases last year, that has settled in the main but several firms are still being relatively aggressive to ensure they secure key talent.
The general trend on pay is now levelling off with clients much more conscious of budgets. We are experiencing more push back on candidates who ask for +20% increases.
Contract demand increasing
The previous ratio of permanent to contract hires was c.80:20, this is now sitting somewhere nearer 70:30 for new vacancies. Rates are stable with some hot spots in certain niche skill sets where we are seeing increases. One issue is the shortage of contract candidates, with many favouring permanent roles over PAYE contracts, particularly given the strong base salaries on offer coupled to good benefits. Gone are the days where a Ltd company contract offer trumped most permanent options.
Back to the office
The drive to get staff back to the office continues, with various top-down communications being well reported; some less favourably than others! There appears to be less resistance with the market being quieter, but it’s still proving challenging for anything more than 3 days a week in the office (even perhaps 2 days).
One important point made by a few senior clients is that if they don’t get staff back in the office, they are more likely to get questioned on the need for a high-cost centre headcount – the theory being that if someone
doesn’t need to come into the office in London, why aren’t they using resource from near/off-shore operations.
Which skills are in demand?
Engineering talent is still the most in demand area, with Python becoming the key dev tool in the sector. This year has seen a broader set of requirements with more project driven roles across BA and PM roles than last year. There has been high demand for Quants/Strats at both Investment banks and buy side firms. Talented mid-level candidates continue to be hardest to find, AVP level, again particularly within engineering skill sets, but not exclusively. IT Security and Cloud specialists have seen some strong demand, with candidates not always
attracted to banking when other sectors can often offer more challenging environments.
One observation, which is becoming more prolific, is demand for skill combinations outside the most common skill sets. These vacancies then become hard to fill as often these combinations significantly reduce the candidate pool. Examples include combining specific banking product knowledge with a key development language and experience of a cloud or data product.
H2 outlook
Projections for the remainder of the year are as difficult to predict as at any time before. This is chiefly due to the wildly different performances and situations of different business areas across our client base.
On the positive side, the urgency and importance of building / replacing strategic platforms to retain / grow market share has not changed. These multi-year builds are generally well-funded, business-critical initiatives. Firms were able to commit wholly to these in 2021/22 due to highly performant business results across, Fixed Income, FX and Commodities. These businesses continue to perform strongly. A handful of Tier One firms are making more positive noises about headcount approval in the coming weeks and Commodities Traders continue to invest and hire aggressively.
The other side of the coin sees business lines across Equities, M&A, Asset Management, some online retail initiatives seeing a real downturn, in all likelihood beginning to invite more scrutiny of hiring spend across the group. Additionally, large scale redundancy programmes in many, particularly US
institutions, are rarely followed by a swift return to hiring and the chill from the events in March/April hangs over some of the market still.
The growth in the available talent pool caused by redundancy programmes (including a large number from the now considerably-less-attractive FAANG firms) and cooling in demand, should probably have a flat-lining event across most salary offers for the coming months. Although real SMEs in those highly-profitable business lines will continue to command intense competition with large increases, indicated/guaranteed bonuses and sign-ons continuing to feature strongly.
With some purse strings being tightened we anticipate continued growth for the proportion of roles being signed off on a contract/temp basis. This will be augmented by the natural propensity of firms to hire contractors to plug very specific gaps, against finite deliverables, around the strategic permanent hires made since the upturn in mid-2021.
Date Posted: 04/04/2023
Date Posted: 23/03/2022
Date Posted: 27/01/2022
Overview.
H2 2021 has seen the London Market rebound to overall levels of demand comparable with any peak in the market over the last 10 years. We probably need to wind the clock back even further to find such a high proportion of London clients actively hiring in earnest, or to find a comparable level of demand for engineers.
The drivers behind this are manyfold, if largely obvious:
•The pre-Covid sense amongst many institutions that their position in certain markets was under some threat through their technology platforms being outperformed by existing competition, or new market entrants, has obviously remained and only been exacerbated by the Covid hiatus on onboarding new talent.
•Many trading functions have returned strong profits in the past 18 months, resulting in funding for tech investment being easier to secure and a return to a focus on front office technology hiring.
•The largely engineering-centric focus of technology functions has presented challenges in terms of internal mobility, resulting in an increased need to source externally.
•Non-revenue-generating initiatives in the Reg space are less of a feature than in many of the previous years and the dial has moved from technology being viewed through a cost-saving lens and into a long-term investment, revenue-generating function. off/near-shoring is more frequently viewed as a less good option and direct recruitment functions are unable to deliver significantly against the more competitive engineering/apps infra hiring we see today.
•Despite the time of year, attrition is naturally becoming a feature and we expect this to only accelerate.
•The Financial Markets are losing an increasing amount of engineering talent to FAANG and similar smaller non-financial (for now?!) software-centric firms.
•Decisions around individual firm’s approaches to the amended IR35 legislation have been formulated, implemented and its impacts have now played out. More firms are now paying the employment costs for PAYE contracts in response to the market, which in effect increases day rates.
Agile working
The shift to a more Agile way of working has seen the market for Project/Programme Managers, BA’s etc remain supressed (albeit having picked up a little recently) and, again unsurprisingly, we are seeing around 85% of our client demand focussing on engineering and application infrastructure hiring, with the CyberSec/Infosec/Secops market also strong.
Which development languages are in demand?
Engineering hires remain focussed on Java hiring, with Python demand continuing to increase, possibly now to Java levels. C++ demand has increased with the shift back to front office investment. Apps infra competition is high for talent with expertise around cloud technologies (AWS being the most dominant cloud provider across our client base) and devops. This market is particularly challenging as the talent pool for hands-on, non-managerial, junior-mid level technologists is relatively small, experienced apps infra candidates often overshooting client briefs in terms of comp-expectations, or short on demonstrable commercial experience.
How are clients responding?
Few clients are seeing anything other than their list of open engineering hires grow, competition is intense and increasing. But some of our clients are making headway, onboarding strong volumes of talent, whilst others are losing out. We thought it would be helpful to share our observations around the approaches to hiring that we are seeing to be successful in the current market;
•This obviously isn’t 2020. But nor is it a hiring climate remotely comparable with previous years. Previous established interview processes, comp decisions/benchmarks and understandings of optimal candidate-experience are largely out of the window. Those firms who understand this are winning.
•Successful clients have moved very quickly on good candidates and make offers in-line with the current market rather than previous benchmarks or pegging offers to current comp.
•Given the time of year we are seeing most clients offering to buy out and/or guarantee (or give written indication of) bonuses.
•Successful interview-processes are agile. Tailoring the focus and interview panel of each round as best suits promising candidates, amalgamating interviews where possible and eliminating rounds which are largely unnecessary or duplicative. Interviews are becoming two-way – understanding not just whether the candidate is suitable for the role and firm, but also understanding the personality and specific commercial/technical interests of the candidate and adjusting future interviews in line with this. An initial 30 minutes two-way exploratory chat explaining the role and understanding candidate motivations lays a good foundation for engagement through the process.
•The above often leads to an offer (not a request) to speak to others in the firm that the candidate may enjoy talking with – stakeholders from the business, senior technologists, sometimes from other teams/regions who can discuss and demonstrate, outside of an interview, the culture, reality and ambition of the firm/team.
•Some clients still have a process lasting 4-6 weeks from a successful interview process to a contract being received, as internal final approvals and contract generation are completed. Needless to say, these firms usually see themselves miss out on prospective hires.
•At least 50% of our candidates – particularly on the mid-level engineering side – will not entertain roles requiring a presence five days a week in the office. Whilst this is obviously often a high-level corporate decision rather than down to individual managers, it has a big impact on attracting talent.
•Direct engagement from a hiring manager or similar, post-offer, pre and post resignation, is highly effective at ensuring candidates remain clear in their mind as to why they’ve decided to join a client and at augmenting our ongoing management of the candidate.
2022 and beyond
Whilst some clients continue to tweak their processes to optimise success rates, some will need to have a more comprehensive reform in order to at least partially achieve their hiring objectives in 2022 – most clients suggesting it being a year that they will “ramp up” hiring yet further. We expect to see no let-up in the demand for engineers with demand increasing across other skills sets with more project roles. This will likely impact contract demand with clients looking for alternative hiring channels.
We would estimate that on average candidate compensation offers across both permanent and temporary engagements have risen by around 20% since May 2021. We expect salaries and temp-rates to continue to rise through 2022, the ceiling may well be determined by those deep-pocketed, tech-centric players outside of the industry against whom many financial institutions will be competing with for talent.
Contact us for the full PDF report including salary and rate analysis.
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As we now grow and continue our journey further I want to reflect on that time and thank past and current colleagues for the part they have played – some significantly (you know who you are).
Putting together a presentation for later today I realised what an amazing client list we have. From Global Investment banks to seed funded start-ups, many of which have been with us since the very early days; I thank you for your continued support and partnership. To our network of candidates, both old and new, many of you we have placed multiple times, thank you for allowing us to further your career or find your next assignment.