"Banking recruitment is extremely cold and brutal"

I work in M&A in the UK. Recruitment industry practices in investment banking are horrible - it’s hard enough to hire in the market, but a couple of my friends who are working in Big4/boutique investment banks have been trying to look out for new roles and have found very little.

To add to this frustration, IB recruiters as organizations are extremely cold and brutal. Treating candidates like garbage doesn’t help. Many recruiters post open calls online, requesting candidates to reach out – but when people do reach out, you don’t hear back from them for weeks. If you do, they gather all the data they can, like current salary, bonus %, notice, visa sponsorship, etc. and ghost you after that. Was the call just to collect data!?

It's highly unethical to treat candidates as non-human entities. Someone close to me is a senior recruitment professional and when I asked him, he told me that most external recruiters don’t really understand relevant work experience and skills. They just act like middlemen, passing on the CVs that are already good and have high chances of getting shortlisted – there’s barely any value addition in what they do.

I have similar social media messages from a couple of years back with a recruiter who told me that they just like “plug and play” resumes, which almost certainly would’ve gotten shortlisted even if they went directly to the internal hiring team.

The fact that no recruiters really want to make a change or be different, and the practice is both deeply frustrating and frankly, a little sad. It discredits their profession, and everyone seems to have literally the same attitude.

Johnny B. Goode is, quite obviously, a pseudonym.

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