Finance sector rewards top IT talent

The REC/KPMG Report on Jobs said both permanent and short-term staffing continued to increase

Against a backdrop of muted overall recovery in the IT recruitment market, pent up demand for niche skills in the financial services sector has seen bidding wars for good candidates, with top-notch developers earning six figure packages and a return to the desperate recruitment tactics of the dot-com era.

IT recruitment is showing strong signs of picking up in the UK, but experts are warning that, overall, recovery will be restrained and it’s far from being a job-seekers market out there.

Toby Babb, senior manager of IT sector recruitment at Badenoch & Clark, said Q1 demand in financial services for IT professionals was up 150 per cent on the same period in the previous year. “The top tier investment banks are scrambling around to fill 70 to 80 vacancies each. They cut too heavily during the recession and now they’re ramping up again.”

Babb said six-figure packages for good developers were not unusual, with business analysts commanding between £100,000 and £150,000, plus bonuses of up to 30 per cent. “If you’re good now, it’s as competitive as ever. If you’re an average candidate with generic skills it’s not as easy to do well.”

Virtualisation skills, candidates with experience of Windows 7 rollouts and expertise relating to cyber crime – in particular vulnerability management and “head of threat” roles – are all hugely in demand, Babb said, as banks and online gaming companies look to mitigate their exposure to online security risks.

Adam Sztuka, managing director of financial services specialist Clarity Resourcing, said regulatory work relating to Basel II banking regulation and merger and acquisition activity were also big drivers for recruitment of business analysts and data aggregation and integration specialists. Interims with those skills can today command day rates of between £350 and £750.

“As mergers progress, companies find their systems don’t scale, so there’s pressure to look at other systems and data extraction tools to give them a better understanding of their liquidity,” Sztuka said.

More generally, the IT recruitment market continued to improve in April, with technology sector jobs enjoying a noticeable increase in demand compared with the previous month, according to a report published recently by recruitment trade body the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) and accountants KPMG.

The REC/KPMG Report on Jobs said both permanent and short-term staffing continued to increase, showing clear signs of economic recovery. Permanent IT staff saw the second-highest growth in demand in April, behind demand for executive and professional staff.

It also highlighted a rise in permanent staff salaries, while temporary and contract hourly pay rates increased at the fastest pace for just over two years. However, IT industry experts played down any chance of dramatic remuneration increases in the short term.

The latest KPMG/REC report found the number of vacancies for temporary staff increasing at the sharpest rate since January 2008. The report, based on a survey of 400 UK recruitment consultants, also found that permanent systems analysts and IT sales staff were also in short supply in April.