Financial Services Job Market Update – Jan To March 2020

What a difference a pandemic can make.

Coming off our busiest December period in memory, the abundance of work flowed into the new year before easing in February.

Some of our clients have taken a conservative approach during March and suspended recruitment activity even for processes that were in very advanced stages.

By contrast, other clients have been determined to achieve long term business strategies and have managed to soldier on. The industry has quickly adapted to the new challenge of working from home as we have successfully adapted to recruiting digitally and onboarding new staff remotely.

It will be interesting to observe the impacts on team and corporate culture from this new work normality.

We have not yet encountered redundancies from our client group and as we begin the new quarter (April to June) recruitment activity is regaining confidence but still reduced.

In general, clients continue to re-prioritise ‘non-essential’ recruitment but are actively filling capacity gaps and replacing staff where required.

For the period of January to March 2020, 45% of our recruitment assignments were completed within funds management, closely followed by insurance at 30% with the remaining split across, investment research, superannuation and wealth management.

• The average salary of all positions we delivered was down on the previous quarter at $115K, the highest salary at $220K was also down and the lowest remained the same at $70,000.
• 39% of placements were male and 61% female.
• 65% of our recruitment assignments were retained and/or exclusive which enabled us to complete a comprehensive search process, and several search processes mapping the entire Australian market.
• 55% of all placements came from candidates which we had previously interviewed via our database or our existing network.

The positions we successfully completed included head of investments, senior portfolio manager, business development managers, FP&A manager, investment accountants (contract and permanent), numerous client and investors services positions, investment analysts, finance manager, change managers, digital marketing professionals, investment operations, product development and client experience manager, associate advisers, manager corporate strategy, and investment risk and compliance manager.

Finally we would like to thank our clients, Victorian Funds Management Corporation, REST Super and Super Investment Management, Generation Life, PIMCO, Legg Mason, Catholic Church Insurance, Equity Trustees, Prime Super, legalsuper, U Ethical, Zenith Investment Partners, Payton Capital, RLDatix, Bell Asset Management, Perpetual, Cooper Investors, Strategic Financial Management, First State Super, IFM Investors, for giving our team the opportunity to partner with their businesses on a range of talent acquisition opportunities.