Financial services, unattractive - whatever next?

There was a frightening story coming from The Recruiter last week highlighting how the credit crunch and failing economy have affected the financial services industry. It also mentions how the financial sector as a whole has become less attractive as a career choice for professionals over the last year, something we at XL-Recruitment and certainly on this blog,have harped on about on numerous occasions.

It seems that, according to Universum UK, financial advisory, IFA, banking and financial organisations in general have seen a reduction in the numbers of professionals applying for their positions, well, all except the Bank of England of course, they still stand at 23rd in the all time list of favourable career choices. Well, those Million pound bonus's are kind of attractive aren't they?

Funnily enough though, students were asked the same survey questions and results demonstrated that banks, auditing firms and management consultants were still deemed to be good career choices. Not a mention of the financial adviser, IFA or Broker consultants roles that are the majority of the financial recruitment sectors bread and butter!

Also, surprise, surprise here but career and job security have come out top on the 'what to consider when choosing where to work' scenario. Of course, its going to come out on top, we're in a recession people. You would have thought that the 2.5 million unemployed might have cemented that idea. In any case, job security came out on top as 'the consideration most likely to affect job choice' in 55.9% of cases.

It appears that the new consideration for companies within financial services is that, more and more employees are staying with the same company. However, with the job layoffs and cost-cutting initiatives, employee engagement is low. When the economy picks up, these employees will be looking for new opportunities and employers will be faced with a challenge: how to deal with rising attrition rates and at the same time meet new market demands. Companies cannot afford to neglect their employer brands.