London financial services hiring is taking its sweet time to come back
Investment banking revenues across the world might be roaring back to life, but there’s still some time to go before hiring comes back.
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Data from recruitment consultant Morgan McKinley says that London’s financial services firm posted the lowest number of jobs in Q3 since 2020, a year wracked by the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.
There were 4,483 new financial services job openings in London in Q3 of 2024, a 17% decline on the 5,400 that joined the market in Q3 of 2023.
Both numbers were huge declines themselves on the 10,059 that joined the market in Q3 of 2021 or the 8,291 that joined the market in the same period of 2019.
Optimism can, however, be derived from the fact that the Q3 2024 London finance jobs figure is up slightly on Q2, in which 4,209 new jobs were posted. Morgan McKinley associate director Mark Astbury calls this a “resurgence in hiring activity.” He says it was mostly driven by “regulatory compliance, digital transformation, and ESG initiatives.”
Any optimism for the future, however, should be snuffed out. Astbury points to the impending UK budget announcement on the 30th of October and the US election a week after that as the most likely factors to “throw a spanner onto any immediate hiring plans.”
It’s not just London that’s suffering from the hiring slowdown. Although there are indications that Goldman Sachs is hiring interns worldwide again, both JPMorgan and Jefferies slowed down hiring significantly in the third quarter, despite revenues continuing to grow on last year.
The general consensus is that banks cut way, way fewer people during the low years of 2022 and 2023 than they really should have – and revenues returning means that banks are growing back into what their workforce can handle, rather than needing more heads to deal with the new work.
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