Recently a headhunter approached a member of the fixed-income department of a leading international bank to try to recruit him for a rival. The candidate, intrigued by the sound of the job, decided to pursue the matter. But it soon turned out that the hiring bank was the very one he had walked out of just months before.
The recruitment business is awash with such embarrassing tales of confusion between banks' business line managers, their own human resources departments and external headhunters.
Recruitment firms are suffering from the general downturn in banking. But there are still bright spots - notably fixed income. These days, hiring the right staff is a serious business. Gone are the boom days when banks needed new bodies to flesh out high ambitions. Now, with mass redundancies, new recruitment has to be guaranteed to boost the bottom line. And the process should be diligent and discreet enough to protect a hiring bank's reputation.
In response, banks need to get a lot more sophisticated and tactical about how they recruit. The hitch is that this is happening when many HR departments are slashing recruitment budgets and the recruitment process is often rather inefficient and disorganised.