Jefferies' appetite for hiring MDs is greatly diminished
If you want a senior job at Jefferies in 2026, you might find it harder to get hired than in the recent past.
At last week's investor day, Jefferies predicted that it will have hired just five investment banking managing directors (MDs) across 2025 as a whole, taking its total to 369.
This is a slowdown on the recent rate of hiring. The firm added 38 new MDs per year on average from 2021 to 2024 - and as many as 50 per year in good years. If the bank ends 2024 with just five new MDs, it'll be barely as many as it added at the height of the pandemic in 2020.
The decline in hiring is despite the firm’s popularity with (potential) new bankers. “Our platform has never been more attractive to super high-quality bankers,” CEO Richard Handler said at the investor day. “Our phone rings a lot.” Bankers are attracted to what Handler calls Jefferies' "entrepreneurial" culture, as well as some rave reviews. "The fact that so many of their friends have come here and have done so well so quickly, that creates a lot of excitement."
The new and reduced hiring appetite reflects Jefferies' intention of making the most of everyone it's hired already. “We have so much to execute,” Handler said last week. “If we just execute the team that we have right now, the scale of what we have… Is really right in front of us.”
Next year, though, Jefferies might be back to hiring again. Speaking at the investor day, the firm's President, Brian Friedman, said it wants to increase MD headcount by another 10% or so - around 37 people in 2026. But he also noted that adding new faces was “no longer a top two or three defining theme” for the firm. Handler confirmed that the bank is not going after new additions as “aggressively” as rivals.
Previous years' hiring is already taking effect. Jefferies said it achieved 3.2% increase in market share in Asia across the last decade, compared to a 0.9% increase in the Americas and a 2.2% increase in EMEA in the same period.
Friedman noted that Jefferies recently hired a pan-Asian head of real estate for the first time ever. Singapore-based Jonathan Quek joined the firm from Citi last month. In May, Citi it added two new senior bankers in Hong Kong, courtesy of CITIC subsidiary CLSA – Robert Levine and Cale McCulloch to cover high-touch and sales-trading, respectively. It also added Gavin Chu from Citi to cover high-touch in China, in the same month.
People have left too, though, Jefferies lost an MD in its FIG team back in April: Hugh Man. And in the USA, it lost two key members of its secondaries team – Matthew Wesley and Andy Nick – in quick succession back in June.
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