PRESS ARCHIVE: 2009

The last two years have been brutal for most Western world economies and the UK in particular, due to our reliance on financial services.  In overall growth terms, this has been made painfully clear by our anaemic growth rates of 0.3 % for the last quarter, with us being the last major European country to crawl out of recession.  This has had an unsurprising effect on recruitment with many more people being made redundant along with fewer positions for people to move into.

Another ‘interesting’ time for financial services.  Looking back a year on from Lehman, we are well beyond the total panic of melt-down Armageddon that took hold last year and continued in a variety of forms until early March, when Western stock markets took off for one of the longest rallies ever – worryingly the longest since the big bear rallies of the early 1930s!  How, if at all, have these endogenous events (to use Gordon Brown’s favourite word) affected recruitment over the past six months? 

Almost without exception, every part of the financial services landscape that we thought was stable has been turned upside down and shaken about over the past year or so.  This uncertainty obviously encompasses the stockmarkets though even distribution is suffering upheaval.

How can it be that, amidst all this gloom, companies are still recruiting and individuals are getting new roles?