Financial services hiring is looking up, if you look at it right
Is financial services hiring increasing towards the end of the year? Are financial services firms cutting back their junior hiring due to AI? Are hedge funds hiring? These are complicated questions, and they are the sort of questions that you can ask in an AMA on our forum for financial services professionals, the bubble.
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Jonny Gilmore has been a recruiter with Michael Page - our ideal recruiter in financial services - for two decades. It’s a long time – long enough to see a few crashes, and a few meteoric rises. Gilmore thinks we’re on the cusp of a less meteoric rise now – more of “a slight upward trajectory.”
Gilmore cites UK Office for National Statistics data saying that there were around 34,000 jobs open in UK financial services in the first half of 2024, and around 32,000 in the first half of 2026, which he called "a flat line," noting that the Q3 figures were only a "marginal" slowdown. Gilmore thinks there’s every reason to be optimistic about Q4.
The impact of AI on hiring, therefore, might be overblown. “A number of the major banks that I talk to,” Gilmore says, are committing “to their graduate hiring programmes, and the reason for that is because it’s the right thing to do ethically.”
Gilmore did not disclose his clients, but it’s not a surprise that these commitments are happening. The UK government has asked finance firms to pledge that they will “maintain and/or grow structured routes into our organisation for new talent.”
It’s interesting that banks would need to pledge to do something they want to do for ethical reasons. Revelio Labs, a market intelligence firm, found that junior roles at US banks have decreased in the last four years (since the introduction of GPT-3.5, basically) while senior roles have increased. “The industry is restructuring around AI rather than being automated by it,” Revelio said.
The strongest demand that Gilmore sees is in fintech and data roles, where vacancies have increased by 50%, he says. At the banks and investment managers that Gilmore recruits for, vacancies are up 15% year on year, mostly in operations, regulatory roles, and transformation. Risk, compliance and regulatory reporting are "just resilient", he says.
Some hedge funds and investment managers "have been doing things really well, but in the same way for 20 or 30 years", Gilmore says, and are now hiring to modernise their technology stacks. But hedge fund hiring in general is slowing. Goldman Sachs’s research this month showed headcount at multi-strategy funds grew 7% in the year to mid-2026, down from 27% in 2023, with less hiring outside investment roles.
Jonny Gilmore is answering questions on the bubble, our forum for financial services professionals today. Sign up and ask a question today!
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