Financial job market news Netherlands | Finance news for recruitment in the financial markets

On one hand, working in M&A is clearly a nightmare. One newly signed-up analyst tells us he’s been working ‘insane hours’ until 3-4am every day, including weekends. On the other hand, the excitement of working on a live deal is difficult to replicate in the corporate world, even if you happen to be working for a go-getting, fast-paced new media company (or the online offshoot of an old fashioned publishing house). This... Read more

Your responses to our call for authentic financial services interview questions revealed the weirdness of financial services interviews in London. However, responses from readers on our French site suggest the interview process in Paris is far more bizarre than that in the City. Most even vaguely French people are now on holiday until September, so you’re unlikely to come across any of these situations for a while. But if you are interviewing... Read more

Pay may be looking a little lacklustre globally, but this doesn’t appear to be the case in Asia. According to Reuters, banks have been paying some enormous guarantees to secure senior bankers in Asia. Some people are reputedly being paid $10m for one year and $15m over two years. In the UK, guaranteed bonuses are now frowned upon, and the FSA has outlawed guarantees lasting more than 12 months. Daiwa wants to... Read more

While we all wait on tenterhooks for Morgan Stanley’s results at 1pm (GMT), further reflection on yesterday’s Goldmanesque revelations suggests that Goldman Sachs may no longer be the world’s best investment bank. Instead, it may be the world’s worst. Analysts at Nomura have produced *clean* results for all the investment banks to have reported so far. They show overall revenues at falling 40% year-on-year at JPMorgan, 37% at BofA Merrill, 49%... Read more

Regardless of the debate around the number of people currently pursuing financial services positions, two things are certain: there are thousands of financial services CVs available on CV databases, and any recruiter advertising a job has to trawl through many hundreds of them every single day. This being so, how can you ensure that your CV isn’t consigned to a life of oblivion? 1) Use key words If you send your CV to... Read more

It won’t seem sufficient to readers of the Daily Mail, but compensation at Goldman Sachs is falling, and will probably fall even more before the end of the year. Thanks to a reasonably disastrous set of results, made worse by the bonus tax, the SEC settlement and a truly calamitous quarter in equities trading (revenues down 89% year on year and 84% quarter on quarter), pay prospects at Goldman Sachs are... Read more

Unfortunately, our win-an-iPad competition is now closed, with the winner to be announced later this week. In the meantime, here's the final instalment of the real life interview questions you sent through. Previous instalments can be viewed here, and here. Click on the questions below to view the answers and to find out something about the situation they were asked in. All organisations have rules, all markets have rules, and sometimes these... Read more

To listen to Jamie Dimon on today’s conference call, anyone would think JPMorgan is about to go out and grow global headcount crazily very soon. Dimon said JPM investment bank is all about having, “more bankers, more countries, more coverage, and more research.” Pressed on this, Dimon said that they want, “more bankers, better bankers, more services, more coverage and more clients.” And this doesn’t only apply to emerging markets. He also... Read more

Earnings season kicks off this week, with JPMorgan, BofA and Citigroup finally expected to divulge what happened in the three months from April. Given that this includes the difficult month of May, it’s not likely to be pretty, although results may be massaged by debt valuation adjustments. If Q2 results aren’t matched by an improvement in the second half, redundancies may well return from October. Lina Saigol highlights this in an... Read more

If you tell a senior banker that between 40% and 60% of his or her bonus must be deferred over three to five years and that the cash portion will be limited to 20-30%, he or she is unlikely to bat an eyelid. After all, Bank of America reduced the cash component of its bonuses to just 15% last year, and most banks deferred at least 50% of 2009 bonuses... Read more

So much for the exodus of London hedge fund trading talent to Geneva. Yes, it emerged yesterday that Alan Howard is going to Geneva, but it emerged too that the Geneva office is likely to be staffed by only 7 of Brevan Howard’s 200 traders by the end of this year. The remaining 193 are hanging on in London. As The Times points out, Alan Howard has several reasons other than... Read more

As a follow-up to our recent hit success, 'killer questions asked in financial services interviews', here's a sequel. All of the questions below have been sent in by site visitors in response to our competition, and all have been encountered by interviewees or asked by interviewers in a financial services context. Click on them to read the answers that were given/desired, and to learn more about the role in question. The competition is... Read more

BarCap and HSBC do not have a monopoly on hiring: Deutsche Bank is doing some too. Yesterday, Josef Ackermann reassured everyone that Deutsche is still ‘hiring hundreds of people for its investment bank.’ Today it emerges that Deutsche plans to expand its agricultural products trading team in London to meet demand from Asia. And in other news... Alan Howard is becoming the third of Brevan Howard's 200 traders to move to Geneva; another... Read more

If you’re a client facing, revenue generating, high earning front office banker, you may begrudge sharing your production with swathes of people in operations, risk, IT, and accounting. It may please you, therefore, to learn that rationalisation remains in vogue. Citigroup and Deutsche have been doing it. Now SocGen’s doing it too. According to Jean Pierre Lambert, an analyst at KBW, the French bank is undergoing a rationalisation process to reduce... Read more

A time of feast or famine may be approaching for OTC derivatives professionals. How you position yourself now could determine whether you starve, or achieve a BMI in excess of 45 at some point in the future. This is because, short term, the outlook for fixed income trading looks ok. Longer term, it doesn’t. From 2012 onwards, analysts at Bernstein Research in the US are predicting that headcount allocated to US banks’... Read more

Following claims that Switzerland is overrated, we thought we'd give it a chance to defend itself. Here, therefore, is a conversation we had with Daniel Loeffler, director at the Economic Development Office of Geneva. Daniel has no qualms about living in Switzerland. 1) Are you actively seeking to encourage people to move from the City of London to Geneva? We are not making any specific actions to encourage people. We rather inform those... Read more

If you’re worried about the likely cash component of bonuses in future, there may be a solution: Cantor Fitzgerald. As a follow-up to our article earlier this week, the US broker has been in touch to clarify its hiring plans and payment formulae. The answer? Yes, it is doing some very big hiring. And yes, it does pay very favourably. “We presently have more than 25 [fixed income] people in London,” says... Read more

The questions asked in investment banking interviews are evidently varied. However, whether you’re interviewing as a rates structurer or an investment banking security guard, you will always be asked this: “Why do you want this job?” And if you give any of the answers below, you are unlikely to get it. 1) I really love this company, I’d really, really love to come and work for you. “You need to be very... Read more

In advance of tomorrow’s UK budget, next weekend’s G20 meeting, and the likelihood of further measures to curb banking pay and profitability, here’s a quick roundup of where we are right now in terms of global banking punitive rankings. Notably, the most worst place so far is probably Holland. However, the EU is keen on coming in close behind. 1) Holland Dutch banks adopted a new voluntary code of conduct in September... Read more

Yesterday, SocGen made a presentation about its intentions for the future. The revelations? It’s been massively outperforming its peer group, it wants to build its fixed income and M&A franchise, and it wants to develop its investment banking activities in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. At first sight, these are all worthy claims and aims. Upon consideration, however, they start to look slightly sketchy. Peer group outperformance? SocGen’s claims to be outperforming... Read more