I was caught short today
Having been caught "short" on my optimistic view of the talent crunch, I finally had to face the music in the form of money market channel CNBC and three interviewers on live television this morning. I was there to comment on the global financial crisis enveloping the world and would have to justify my optimistic position on employment and recruitment in general.
The doomsday scenarios on job losses on Wall Street and London are being touted as anything up to 250,000.
Even though I believe this to be an over-reaction, I felt I had to agree that in the Financial Services sector, at least in the short term, the news was not good for recruitment companies exclusively focusing on investment banking and its risky family of counter parties. I am sure Jon Moulton of Alchemy partners would agree.....
Just for the record, we don't do schadenfreude* at Harvey Nash so I reminded the viewers of the following facts given the media headlines crying foul over executive pay, stock options and greedy "spivs".**
1. There are other sectors showing growth such as professional services, new media, embedded technology, security, public sector management and wireless applications. Global skills shortages will not disappear overnight as the bankers jobless queue grows.
2. Many of those working in the City of London are skilled professional immigrants, the impact on the local workforce would therefore be reduced by the effect of these immigrants returning to Europe, the US, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia. That's where our own research tells us they hail from - and they number in the hundreds of thousands. Many are being caught by the so called non-dom taxes and don't need much more to get them packing. So my personal view is that white collar unemployment in London is not going to rise as much as the economists expect for this simple reason.
3. The unemployed traders and bankers facing the current reality check are going to have to make an expectation adjustment in terms of their next job, remuneration, status etc. But their education, smarts, trading skills and innate feel for prices in a global market are being sought after in other sectors which rely heavily on commodity prices, hedging and forward contracts. A good example is the oil and gas industry. Also the retail energy sector, which has whole divisions involved in this activity.
So my humbling was somewhat mitigated and I am sticking to my original optimistic observations about the professional and senior executive markets. Slow down, yes. Even a sharp correction, Armageddon? Mostly definitely not. Most of it looks to be priced in from where I sit.
But the best bit of luck was the record increases in stock markets all over the world on screens behind me as the selling stopped and now there was frantic buying. The crisis seemed to have hit the floor, at least for now, with the US Treasury intervention.
That suddenly made my confidence in the middle of the storm (in the studio) look quite a bit more intelligent.
*A word of German origin, philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno defined Schadenfreude as "largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another..."
** Spiv is a British word for a particular kind of petty criminal, who deals in stolen goods or fraudulent sales, especially a well-dressed man offering goods at bargain prices. The goods are generally not what they seem or have been obtained illegally.
September 19, 2008 02:58 PM | Permalink
