Morning Coffee: Deutsche hiring expensive old timers, and a mystery solved at Barclays

For a bank that’s cutting, Deutsche Bank isn’t half doing a lot of hiring . According to Financial News *, it’s on track to make as many as 50 hires at the Managing Director level this year (so far, it’s hired 12). This might be thought a bit strange as Deutsche has a bit of a reputation for being top-heavy in its pay structure, but it’s actually quite a natural phenomenon. Paradoxically, when you fire a load of people, you often have to do a lot of hiring too. The trouble is that cutting headcount is not an exact science. When you fire 10% of your staff, you can expect that another 10% will leave; people react to uncertainty at their current employer by looking out to the wider market, and once a resume is out on the street, it’s out there. And the 10% who leave are often exactly the ones that you’d rather keep. Get the latest career advice and insight from eFinancialCareers straight to your inbox So, a bank that is going through a cost-cutting process will find that it has a lot of damaged franchises (like the Deutsche Bank FIG team in London, which lost five MDs in the space of a few weeks). And if you haven’t yet decided to shut these business lines down altogether, that means that they need to be repaired; you can patch things up temporarily with juniorisation , but if you’re going to stop an impaired franchise losing money, you need to bring in a banker or trader with a personal franchise. Deutsche has always recognised this; it’s been clear from the start of the year that there would still be hiring in fixed income and in DCM origination. But … hiring the people with the very best franchises […]

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