City’s jobs market slows at fastest rate since 2008, survey suggests
The number of jobs posted by City finance firms dropped at its fastest pace since the financial crisis in 2023, a new survey suggests.
According to recruitment firm Morgan McKinley, there were 42 per cent fewer jobs available in the financial services sector in the fourth quarter of last year than a year earlier.
The survey also revealed that the number of job seekers had fallen 15 per cent over the same period.
The steep fall in hiring activity in the financial sector comes amid the most aggressive round of job cuts since the financial crisis. Across 2023, global banks shed more than 60,000 jobs, largely undoing the frenetic hiring spree that followed the pandemic.
Hakan Enver, managing director at Morgan McKinley UK, noted that the “competitive job market” seen in 2022 had “changed quickly in 2023”.
Enver pointed to a number of factors which had contributed to the “market slowdown”, including high interest rates, inflation and geopolitical conflicts.
The slowdown in the financial services sector has hit recruitment firms hard, who specialise in sourcing talent for the City’s banks, insurance firms and brokerages.
Last week Hays reported that fees were down 15 per cent in the last quarter of 2023 compared to a year earlier. The recruitment firm also flagged that profit would be around £10m lower than markets had expected.
FTSE 100 firm Robert Walters also reported that fee income had been hit at the end of 2023, with it falling 13 per cent on the same period last year. Both firms cut headcount by five per cent quarter-on-quarter as they struggled with falling revenue.
PageGroup, listed on the FTSE 250, is scheduled to update markets on Monday morning. Its shares have already lost 6.4 per cent this year as investors fret over how it will have responded to the slowdown in hiring.