There is no silver bullet/North Star when it comes to measuring demand in the U.K. financial services job market. Over the years I have looked at everything from indices from recruitment agencies, aggregated job board data as well as government/ONS data. All of them are useful indicators but fail to offer an accurate reflection of what’s happening across Financial Services as well as individual and significant sub-sectors.

Step forward the City Career LAB job market index which captures data directly from corporate careers sites as a way of measuring jobs activity - specifically demand. It’s not perfect*, but based on what I know about when and how employers use job boards, job aggregators and agencies/ search firms - this is perhaps the most accurate indicator of hiring demand in the U.K. financial services jobs market.

Going forward, every month I will collect and analyse data from a broad and diverse basket of employers that I have handpicked to represent a particular sub-sector of Financial Services in the U.K. such as:

Banking & Markets: Corporate & Investment Banking, Markets, Securities Services (excl. Consumer/retail)
Investment management: Asset Management, Alternatives
Insurance: General, Life, Reinsurance, Broking
Wealth & Private Banking
Fintech: Banking, Lending, Payments, Insuretech, Crowdfunding
Information Services: Data Providers, Ratings Agencies, Risk Analytics

The results which include all permanent and fixed term contract positions across all functions of the chosen organisations will be published to my website and Linkedin - to show and explain the direction of the hiring market(s) from month to month, and as of next year – Year on Year too.

*Lack of perfection is based on the fact that it typically won’t pick up the majority of the Senior Director/ED or MD positions as not many of these get posted in the first place. However, it will pick up the majority of positions at other levels, which is 90% of all open roles – thereby proving a good indication of hiring demand for that sub sector more generally. There is some inevitable ‘contamination’ of the data where firms are operating across more than one area but I am confident that my choice of firms and the way I have collected the data will minimise the impact of this to less than 5%.