Over last six weeks, job flow among compliance workers in the City of London has picked up. Before that, the market for compliance jobs in financial crime was quiet, but not any longer.

The parameters that financial firms set for candidates are more specific than ever before, and I mean ever. Not long ago, an AML analyst at an investment bank used to be able to go down the road (traditionally his skills were relatively translatable) and do the same at a corporate bank or something that specialised in trade finance or correspondent banking – or even at an asset manager. That skill-set was considered transferable to entirely different types of financial institution. No longer!

Now when I work with financial clients, they want to hire compliance people from their own type of bank – this used to be a 'nice to have' for employers; they wanted (but did not insist on) previous or consistent experience in their own particular niches. To think of an example, a micro-sized business (rather than a business that did corporate banking) was also prepared to take on someone with experience working in a FinTech bank/digital bank. Now, however, if you don't fit the exact profile, you are going to be discounted at application stage. This is happening for the first time.

When I look for positions for candidates these days, I embark on a really refined search each time. In some of these jobs, the ability to speak this-or-that foreign language is vital. I really cannot think of a bog-standard job appearing on the market since August.

This, I think, is because the market is saturated on the candidate side. In the summer, hiring was sluggish. A lot of candidates have suddenly become available and, indeed, more people are looking for employment than there are jobs. Emboldened by this, financial institutions are now asking for the moon on a stick. Job flow has picked up slightly and now clients are saying "we can afford to be picky."

It is true that employers have been terribly quick off the mark in changing their specifications. They were asking for generic candidates in the past and suddenly in the last 6 weeks they have been asking for very specific types of candidate. They seem to have become very speedy at grasping the cold hard facts of economics, and that is not because they have received any coaching from my firm! We are now seeing a larger number of applications per compliance job advert than before. If I advertise a ‘know your customer’ job on social media these days, I expect to see 100 candidates/applications appear in the first hour.

Perm or temp?

At the moment, 90% of my business revolves around the hiring of contract workers rather than permanent workers. The permanent side of compliance recruitment was more stable in the summer than the contract side. We are now in a more busy time of the year for contracts – Q3 going into Q4. The whole scenario revolves around bonuses, because at this time of year managers have budget surpluses to use up and they want to spend them hiring contractors because they might otherwise lose those budgets next year. Also, a manager who is approaching a deadline for a project at the end of the year and has the resources to do something extra is more likely to hit his target and earn his bonus if he uses those resources. This, too, is another reason why banks are spending money at the moment.

There is no such thing as the perfect CV!

On a separate note, a curriculum vitae is a very personal affair and often does not tell the prospective employer all he needs to know about the candidate. A massive part of this is to do with communication skills, which are important in an office. An employer cannot tell whether a candidate for a job has good communication skills just by reading his CV. On top of that, the candidate might struggle in an interview but still have very good communication skills in a work setting.

There is a flip side to this – the candidate might be excellent at talking the prospective employer through his job during a meeting, but his CV might be terrible. The formatting and type of language can be unfairly deceptive. Perhaps he originally wrote it a few years ago and in today's world the diction looks stale. The CV might tell the employer one thing and it could be a very different story when he and the candidate actually meet.

There is another problem with CVs. When you look at a CV you cannot tell if the candidate is lazy. Anyone can put on a mask for an interview – indeed, some lax people can even keep up an efficient façade for the first two weeks on the job.

Interviews

Some financial firms do a lot of interviews before they hire compliance candidates, some only one – the market contains all shapes and sizes. I have not detected a trend where interviews are getting longer or more frequent on average. Sometimes a deep conversation is the best way forward, sometimes not. If you are reading this just before you go into an interview, good luck!

* James Batters can be reached on +44 207 092 0281 or at jbatters@morganmckinley.com