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What chance do Anglo staff have of finding re-employment?
24 September 2009
Amid one of the worst employment markets in living memory, beleaguered lender Anglo Irish Bank is due to unveil a wide-ranging cost-cutting exercise next month, which could see hundreds of jobs lost. What chance do its employees have of finding new positions?
The bank has been working with external consultant Deloitte since May to determine the scale of a programme designed to shrink costs “to match the balance sheet size”.
October is crunch time, and sadly - with an average pay of €106k - reducing headcount seems inevitable, particularly since just 100 staff have left in the last year (mainly through natural attrition).
Anglo’s employees have every right to be nervous – and they’re not the only ones. We understand no one in Ulster Bank’s commercial lending division has stepped forward for the voluntary redundancies announced in August because of the improbability of finding a new post.
Should, as seems likely, the Anglo redundancies occur within its commercial lending functions, the good news is that it won’t be entirely impossible for them to find alternative employment.
“We’ve seen increase in contract roles of commercial lending and corporate divisions of banks, as they prepare for NAMA, when they don’t have such expertise in-house,” says Andrea Clarkson, manager, financial services at Premier Group.
Irish Nationwide is also recruiting, and ING is hiring in small numbers, say headhunters. However, obviously these are unlikely to soak up the hundreds saturating the jobs market. What's more, Bank of Ireland’s and AIB’s recruitment freezes look set to continue until the end of 2010.
“Their corporate lending recruitment, like everything else, has simply gone off the radar for the last year, and this is a significant chunk of total hiring in this space,” says one headhunter.
A growing number of Irish corporate bankers are finding work in the UK says Fintan Lawler, banking consultant, Hudson. Those that stay are having to readjust their expectations.
“We’re seeing a growing number of people with 10 years of commercial property lending on their CV and nothing else,” he says. “The reality is they’ll have to up-skill, gain experience in another sector and drop down a few levels.”
Anglo's remuneration system was not market based and has inflated employee expectations. Counterparts at major Irish Banks earn less than 2/3rds of the average Anglo salary. Too good to be true at Anglo? Apparently so.
Rachelcs 28 Sep 2009
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