Financial news Ireland – job market news, recruitment & career trends in Ireland for the finance sector

Sean Crowe, BIAM's COO and head of global fixed income and specialist products, fields eFinancialCareers’ questions, and will answer yours if you ask nicely… A brief history of your career? I joined Eagle Star Asset Management as a trainee investment manager and was lucky enough to be given bond portfolios to manage in the first year. I spent four subsequent years there as a bond and currency asset manager. I was... Read more

Sean O’Murchu, head of direct business, fields our questions, and will answer yours if they tickle his fancy… A brief history of your career? I joined Bank of Ireland straight out of college in 1987 and went into various clerical roles. I studied an ACCA at night and the first real job I got was financial controller of Bank of Ireland trust services in 1995. I stayed there for five years and... Read more

Like the dizzy blonde early on in every horror movie, I am ignoring the spooky music and walking down the dark staircase to the cellar. Or, to put it in other words, in the worst hiring climate in decades, I have resigned from my job with nothing lined up to move on to. To put this in context, neither I nor anyone whose bank account I have access to is... Read more

As the financial crisis really took hold in Ireland towards the end of 2008, financial services professionals understandably hunkered down and attempted to weather the storm. The situation in 2010 is still far from rosy, but jobs are being created again. Why, then, are candidates still in such short supply? A culture of fear is still clearly infecting financial services professionals in Ireland. There were nearly nine times as many... Read more

Around Dublin, software companies are continuing to expand. But well over 50% of their new hires are from outside Ireland. Luckily, Ireland is an attractive place to work (and play), so finding these employees is no problem, at least for now. But how this continued growth in these darkening times, and why the shortage of Irish people to meet it? In the IT boom of the 1990s it was the... Read more

Unemployment in Ireland is on the rise, but financial services is bucking the trend and recruitment numbers have actually increased from this time last year. The figures from the Central Statistics Agency on unemployment in Ireland paint a bleak picture overall. Growth in the labour market has slowed from 3.8% last year to 2.6% in 2008 and the number of jobless individuals has risen by 9.3%. But in the... Read more

The impact of the current turmoil in financial markets has had a traumatic effect on countries, companies and, most of all, people. In a very short period of time we have seen a dramatic turnaround in the employment market. Companies have had to look at ways of reducing costs and one of the quickest ways of doing this is to lower staff headcount. Firms will not take the decision to make... Read more

When a large number of financial services firms in Ireland enacted recruitment freezes towards the end of 2008, many thought this was likely to be a short-lived phenomenon. But, in spite of some improved sentiment around hiring activity in Q3 2009, few firms are showing any real signs of expansion. There are, however, some sectors that have weathered the storm and continue to offer job opportunities. Fund administration, previously such a... Read more

Banking's not for wimps, but neither should you tolerate being bullied, says Hugh Karseras, author and senior banker. Does bullying go on in the City? In my experience, yes, but don't expect to see trading floor managers hurling chairs at hapless underlings. Bullying in the City is often a lot more subtle, a lot harder to evidence and a lot more insidious. It's important to differentiate between someone who is normally... Read more

John Bowman, CFA, Head, Educational Products tells us why having ‘Chartered Financial Analyst’ (CFA) after your name will make all the difference to your career. While supervising the examination in Los Angeles last Saturday, it struck me how much growth the CFA Program has experienced in the last decade. Over 126,000 candidates in more than 145 countries enrolled for the June and December 2006 examinations. That compares to about 70,000 only... Read more

Gemma Allen, director of the professional services team at recruitment firm Robert Walters, tells us why Ireland’s finance companies need to get creative about finding staff and retaining staff. The Irish candidate shortage is severe and about to get severer still. 8,000 new jobs are expected to be created in the Irish market in the next five years and the Dublin labour pool alone will be unable to fill them. In this... Read more

Just how unscathed is Ireland likely to be from the credit crunch? Pretty much totally if the sentiments of domestic banks are anything to go by. While banks in the US and the UK are revealing increasing horrors behind structured credit investments, Irish banks are being defiantly bullish. Bank of Ireland is the latest to come out with positive results, claiming its “absolutely insignificant” allocations to structured investment vehicles (SIVs), collateralised debt... Read more

Sometimes your words can come back to haunt you. Four months ago, I was waxing lyrical about how the conservative nature of Irish banks would mean they’re likely to ride out the credit crunch. Now, however, the picture looks decidedly grim. Bank of Ireland’s share price fell to the lowest level in 19 years after it said the deteriorating Irish economy was “adversely impacting” earnings. Allied Irish Bank, Anglo Irish... Read more

Never has a good CV been more important. If you’ve lost your job recently, you will probably need to re-brand yourself to get back into the job market, as an exact vacancy similar to the one you’ve left is unlikely to exist elsewhere. Your personal sales brochure Your CV, or résumé, is the vehicle through which you market yourself and gain interviews – it is your sales brochure. In a... Read more

The harder you work, the luckier you get. It might sound obvious, but preparation is the key to interview success. Invest time into preparing yourself for interview and you will improve your confidence, your performance and, ultimately, your results. If this is so obvious, why do many jobseekers choose to ignore it? Some are lazy and cut corners or are simply overconfident about their interviewing ability. However, many do... Read more

Considering the time and money spent training employees, it makes sound business sense to redeploy them to other areas of the business rather than making them redundant. Moving an employee sideways to another position also allows them to explore different skills or attributes, which adds to job satisfaction and loyalty to the company. However, obviously this isn’t always possible, and when firms look outside the company to fill a new... Read more

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On London trains, there is a poster campaign which features uniformed employees battered and bruised. Its purpose is to highlight the increasing levels of physical abuse dished out by frustrated commuters on its staff. What’s the point of me mentioning this, you might ask? Well, in spite of the obvious physical and psychological damage it causes the staff member involved, you have to wonder what the perpetrators expect to achieve.... Read more

“You’re fired”. When Alan Sugar says it on The Apprentice, there’s an element of comedy and a large dollop of theatre. But when it happens to you it’s infinitely less dramatic, but just as likely to spark a range of disturbing emotions. When you’re made redundant, HR usually roll out the line: “It has nothing to do with you personally, this decision is being driven by the business”. But... Read more

It’s all very well keeping the ‘shop window’ corporation tax rate at 12.5%, but the tough stance on income tax in Ireland’s emergency budget could have the unintended consequence of erecting a stumbling block to the flow of foreign financial services firms entering the country. Just to clarify, the income levy – controversially imposed in October 2008 - has been doubled in this week’s emergency budget. It rises to 2% for... Read more