Winter is coming, and hiring freezes are descending in the City and Wall Street. Barclays, which has managed to reduce headcount by 14,000 just by not hiring for nearly a year, and now Deutsche Bank have both put a hold on recruitment.
Deutsche Bank has been here before, rolling out hiring freezes globally in both 2013 and 2014, and it’s not uncommon for banks to dial back recruitment in Q4. Barclays, meanwhile, has been both curtailing recruitment and pursuing a tactic of getting rid of expensive, senior bankers.
And yet, at both banks there are some rays of hope.
Barclays is on the look out for two managing directors in its new Group Intelligence Centre and Group Investigations Centre. This is not just about cyber-security. The division deals with everything from potential terrorist attacks and pandemics to political threats.
Barclays is hiring for a group head of intelligence, which asks for a strange combination of an understanding of Big Data and machine learning and experience within either law enforcement or the military. The other role, group head of investigations, asks for a similar combination of experience. Further down the tree, it’s also hiring for a VP of inquiries and investigations in New York.
To give you an idea of what Barclays wants here, currently Stuart Tootal is global head of physical security at Barclays and is a former colonel in the British Army. Meanwhile, Troels Oerting is group chief security officer – the new roles report into him. He was previously police chief superintendent at Europol and is also acting head of the counter terrorist and financial intelligence centre there.
Deutsche Bank is, of course, being swamped with fines and regulatory headaches right now, so has excluded its compliance functions from the hiring freeze.
However, it also currently has 32 technology jobs open in London alone and a further 72 based out of New York.
There’s no guarantee that Deutsche will sign off on these vacancies, but it’s in the midst of a huge transformation of its tech functions. On the one hand, COO Kim Hammonds is leading a project to modernise and simplify Deutsche’s outdated technology architecture. On the other, Deutsche has been hiring senior technologists – often from Goldman Sachs – to revamp its risk and pricing platform. It therefore seems unlikely that hiring will stop entirely.
Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com
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