Employee Poaching On The Rise On Wall Street

[Andy Nguyen]

Employee poaching is becoming more aggressive on Wall Street, and firms are taking note: more than 40% of recruiters and hiring managers are currently assessing which employees are at highest risk of poaching, according to a new survey from eFinancialCareers.

Poaching is taking place both from within the financial industry itself and outside - with technology departments most likely to poach from outside Wall Street, the survey found.
eFinancialCareers interviewed 200 hiring managers and recruiters on Wall Street. Out of these, 57% said they expect poaching to become more assiduous on Wall Street over the next year.

"There was a difficult time after the crisis. A lot of people stayed put for the last couple of years. They were reluctant to move as they didn't know how green the grass was on the other side. But we're past that now. Poaching is on the upswing," says Constance Melrose, managing director of eFinancialCareers North America.

The technology industry is the number one industry where hiring managers believe employees can transition into financial services. Similarly, technology departments at Wall Street firms are those most likely to hire from outside the capital markets industry. [They were followed by accounting/corporate finance and operations departments.]

"Technology is so crucial to having a competitive edge on Wall Street. There are not enough technologists to go around as they are needed for areas like high-speed trading, rapid modeling and real-time modeling. So they're very valuable," Melrose says.

Of particular value is anyone who knows the C programming language, since it is used for high-speed trading and real-time modeling, Melrose adds.

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/articles/229218893

 

[Andy D.]

I've def noticed an upswing in the number of recruiters contacting me over the past 2 months. A lot of these jobs are for NYC based financial firms.
Whilst I'm happy not making a move at the moment, it seems like there is a lot of jobs starting to pop up. One guy was telling me he's having a hell of a job finding Java developers for 8 roles he needed to fill in CT.
I'm guessing the proximity to New York is part of the problem as it sucks up the talent.

 

[DominiConnor]

Before I comment on this I would like to make it clear that I never, ever contribute to the US edition of eFinancialCareers, any writing you see under my name is for the UK version. There are reasons for that.

I never really thought of myself as a poacher, more a sort of assassin, armed only with a pistol and Kukri knife between my teeth, slipping like a Ninja past bank security, and taking out targets with laser precision. I know this to be true, it's on my resume

I am entertained by this article on multiple levels.
Firstly as any Quantnetter knows, I have explained the value of C++ not C.

I flatly reject the idea the idea that any serious % of recruiters or managers seriously "assess" the chances of someone being poached. I don't do it because I can't. With all due modesty, I'm bloody good at this, and unless people share with me some view on their current role, I can't work it out. How would I ? My model is that pretty much everyone is equally poachable, not because this is true, but because I rarely know otherwise until I approach them.

Managers rarely have any sort of useful view on who is likely to leave, unless they've been 'incentivising' them to do so. Sure they'd love to know, but I'm not telling them, and unless you're utterly dumb you don't tell your boss until the die is cast.

One fact to know is that rarely do I 'poach' most times someone is feeling that there are more yesterdays than tomorrows in their current position, and techies are in general much less happy these days than in the past.

 

[euroazn]

Firstly as any Quantnetter knows, I have explained the value of C++ not C.

To be fair, C has its advantages. Not having to deal with objects means faster performance (no garbage collection, for instance.) That's the major reason C is a preffered language in robotics, for example - C++ may be too slow for some tasks.

 

[marina]

To be fair, C has its advantages. Not having to deal with objects means faster performance (no garbage collection, for instance.)

1. Creating objects does not affect the performance of a C++ program. The constructor is just a function call.
2. There is no GC in C++.

 

[euroazn]

1. Creating objects does not affect the performance of a C++ program. The constructor is just a function call.
2. There is no GC in C++.

1. I never said creating objects themselves affects the performance; rather, the overhead from conceptualization slows down the program. Example: C I/O is faster than C++ streams.
2. You can still use one, it's just not pre-implemented. Also, Bjarne Stroustrup has said that C++ will have a garbage collector at some point in time. However, I was just talking about procedural/object-oriented programming in general.

 

[DominiConnor]

euroazn is wholly wrong about C & C++

GC and object creation are different things, and he needs to revise struct creation.

C is sometimes preferred in embedded applications like robotics because they are space constrained, and it's relatively easy to knock up a C compiler for a new process/HW platform and rather harder for C++

 

[euroazn]

GC and object creation are different things, and he needs to revise struct creation.

I never said they were the same thing. Additionally, I don't believe I mentioned structs, what do you mean, exactly?

C is sometimes preferred in embedded applications like robotics because they are space constrained, and it's relatively easy to knock up a C compiler for a new process/HW platform and rather harder for C++

Yes, this is also true.