In this interview we talk for a second time to a compliance recruitment expert whose experience in the field is unparalleled. David Symes, the principal of Compliance Recruitment Solutions, began as a compliance officer in the 1980s when the UK enacted the Financial Services Act. Thirty years on, he is still at the peak of his profession.

David Symes' experience in compliance goes back beyond the first "white-collar recession" in 1990-93. An accountant by trade, he entered the compliance job market more or less by accident. He was an auditor at Banque Indosuez before joining Guardian Royal Exchange to help set up its first ever compliance department. In 1996 he set up Compliance Recruitment Solutions and although 2020 has been a terrible year for recruitment so far, CRS is soldiering on. This article takes the form of a question-and-answer session.

Q: How stands the British compliance job market?

A: The British compliance job market is stagnant. Just before it became so, however, it was benefiting from the 'Boris Bounce.' This phenomenon was a surge in business that occurred partly because the United Kingdom had left the European Union with the foundations of a trade deal in place, but mainly because political uncertainty had evaporated after the election in December.

Not only had the threat of a very left-wing and unpopular economic policy under Corbyn receded, but so had the uncertainty of a hung parliament and instead we had a Government with a majority of 80. Boris was elected too late in December to have any beneficial effect on compliance jobs before the New Year and in fact we didn’t see such an effect till February, just in time for Covid 19. So far, there seem to be hardly any redundancies, but at recruitment firms all over London most of the vacancies that financial firms were trying to fill before 'lockdown' were either frozen or cancelled by the end of March. Now, quite a few financial services firms have people on furlough.

Q: Will it pick up?

A: Well, for that to happen, the offices of London's financial service companies have to go back to normal, which both requires firms to reconfigure them for the purposes of social distancing and requires the Government to make some kind of announcement to the effect that it is fine for non-essential workers to travel on buses and on the tube. My impression is that financial service workers will be one of the last groups of workers to be allowed back into their offices.

Workers from all walks of life have been rating themselves according to whether they can work efficiently from home or not and the results are very different from each other. Only 20% of retail workers say that they can work from home effectively. By contrast, 85% of workers in IT say that they can, and 82% of workers in financial services say that they can. Hence, as financial firms are likely to be amongst the last to go back to normal office working, the job market is pretty sunk for the moment.

There are other problems that the job market has to surmount, e.g. if a bank takes on new people, how is it going to train them? A great deal of training happens on the job, mainly at the junior level but certainly also at the middle level and probably at all levels and even M/S teams is no substitute for proper face-to-face interaction reviewing documents etc.

Then there is a third problem. However effective Zoom interviews are, they are not going to replace face-to-face interviews for permanent jobs, particularly senior ones. A financial company is unlikely to offer a senior job to anyone without meeting him or her properly, while the candidate is not likely to jump ship without meeting the people for whom he is going to be working (though things may be different for a candidate who is not working at present but wants to re-enter the compliance job market, or of course a contractor, particularly if he is in a job that can be done remotely like surveillance).

Q: Surely recruitment goes on because people are always leaving their jobs, necessitating more appointments. Is that the case?

A: A fourth barrier to turnover in the job market comes when there is a retirement or a resignation at a firm during these months of lockdown. If the leaver is the only compliance officer or money-laundering reporting officer (MLRO) in the business, the firm has to replace him ASAP by law, but although the regulator does have a duty to ensure that the firm has an effective compliance team in quality and quantity, it will find it harder than usual to insist that the firm should replace anyone else if the firm is operating in a time of uncertainty and can neither foresee future income nor work volume, let alone bring onboard a new employee easily.

To put it another way, in normal times the regulator might object to a bank allowing its compliance headcount to drop by 20% or even 10%, claiming that it does not now have enough people, but it seems unlikely that it will do so in today's circumstances.