The UK jobs market is not exactly booming. Finance recruitment, however, is behaving as though it has only partly received the message.
There were 702,000 vacancies in June to August 2026, according to the latest ONS labour market figures, while the Bank of England says companies are finding recruitment easier than usual and increasingly reserving new hires for specific skills gaps.
You might expect that to translate neatly into fewer opportunities in the City. So far, it hasn’t.
Permanent hiring in London returned to growth over the summer. The KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs recorded another rise in London permanent placements in August, while permanent appointments across the UK increased for the first time since September 2022. Accounting and financial services was one of only two sectors where permanent vacancies actually increased.
Graduate finance is stranger still.
Dartmouth Partners says applications for early-career positions are 37 per cent higher than a year ago, without an equivalent increase in roles. Base salaries across investment banking and asset management have largely stayed put. Quant, trading and technology are more conspicuous exceptions, with some graduate packages now exceeding £100,000.
There are plenty of people applying for finance jobs, then. There are also firms that still want to hire. Unfortunately for candidates, these are not quite the same thing as an easy jobs market.
Banks can still be surprisingly short of the people they want
The Bank of England’s September Agents’ report says candidate availability has increased generally, but shortages remain in specialist and technical roles. Some employers are favouring experienced people who can become productive quickly.
Finance has its own version of the problem.
UK dealmaking looks healthy if you start with the money involved. PwC puts first-half UK M&A value at £124.2bn, more than double the previous year. Look at the number of transactions and the picture changes: deal count fell 13 per cent, while ten transactions accounted for almost two-thirds of the value.
That sort of market can produce some peculiar staffing requirements. A team working on one of the transactions absorbing much of the fee pool may need another experienced pair of hands while a quieter team across the floor is in no hurry to replace somebody who left three months ago.
For junior bankers, deal experience consequently becomes rather valuable rather quickly. Having spent two years nominally in M&A tells a recruiter less if much of that period was quiet.
The graduate market is getting crowded
Graduate recruitment works differently. Banks need a pipeline of analysts who can eventually become associates and VPs, which gives their programmes a degree of insulation from the wider employment market.
The overall graduate picture is less comfortable. High Fliers’ Graduate Market research says recruitment at the UK’s leading employers has fallen 24.5 per cent since 2022, a larger decline than during either the pandemic or the 2008-09 recession. Its sample includes many of the largest investment banks and financial institutions.
The competition for the remaining places is meanwhile becoming less pleasant.
AI has made it considerably easier to submit an application. Dartmouth says employers are responding to higher application volumes with greater selectivity, while paying more attention to the quality of the candidate experience and progression available once somebody joins.
So a falling UK vacancy count probably offers little comfort to somebody opening their sixth banking application of the evening.
There are still seats available in finance.
There are simply rather a lot of people trying to sit in them.
