UK
When Barclays Capital wants to hire people, it lets it be known very publicly.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs appear to be a little more discreet about such matters.
Although Citigroup’s third quarter results reveal the removal of another 3,000 staff across the organization in the past quarter (making 47,000 redundancies since the start of this year), the Wall Street Journal reported this week that Citi has added 300 staff in European ‘capital markets’ since January.
Separately, Goldman’s third quarter results reveal the addition of 500 people over the past three months alone.
As everyone knows, BarCap has also been busily hiring. However, while the BarCap news archive is abuzz with stories about all the people it’s been attracting, both Goldman and Citi are notably silent about their new recruits.
When we called Citi to enquire who all these people are, we were met with a “no comment.” However, an insider at the bank pointed out that as an ‘established institution’ they have no need to talk about all the people they’ve been bringing on unlike Barcap.
There may be an alternative reason for Citi’s surreptitiousness. Headhunters say many of its new recruits are for the equities business, which is being rebuilt under Derek Bandeen. That business was trimmed in early 2008, leading to the possible conclusion that Citi may have overfired.
The other important reason here is that both Citi and Goldman and a huge number of other organisations have done is fire underperforming staff and replace with better candidates. Unfortunately as this is often illegal, or complicated, the easiest way to do it is to make their position redundant and re-hire under a slightly different job title.
Yeah, Citi’s an “established institution” all right…..established at bloatedness, and losing large sums of money.
I love the way the article slags off Barcap, which basically stole all Lehman’s good businesses without taking on any of the crap divisions. Besides JPM, and its gift of Bear Stearns and WaMu, Barcap came out of this crisis better than anyone.
Sounds like Citi could learn something from Dimon and Diamond.
Only GS interviews everybody and rejects 99%
Mmmm I guess if you fire 47k people you can hire 500 back, especially when the govt hands you money after saving your bacon when you were dead in the water.
Performance based retention is a joke in all the companies. Learning from the companies I worked, i tend beleive professionalism, performance based promotion are just text book topics to be discussed in corporate governance class rooms and business schools, at least in the service industry. No company is an exception.
For regular staff (as opposed to the Bankers) performance based reward and retention is now an accepted joke. They work you stupid without recognition, knowing if you leave, the slack will be picked up by the overworked people left. If it gets too much, they can hire cheaper less competent offshore staff or expensive contractors.
The only power you have is to create leverage, so staff don’t knowlege share to make themselves indispensable and the company pays by being less efficient.