eFinancialCareers

Forget investment banking job cuts, fund managers are defiantly bullish on hiring: most are planning to add staff.

The latest CBI-PwC financial services quarterly survey says a balance of 73% of fund management firms are looking to recruit over the next three months, a figure only slightly down from the 80% for the previous quarter when the sub-prime crisis was a mere dot on the horizon.

Headhunters confirm hiring has a rosy hue. Chris Manfield, head of European asset management at search firm Whitney Group, says: “On the product side, it’s only in fixed income that hiring seems to be affected. Other areas, like equities, real estate and emerging markets are still very strong.”

A separate study by Citywire, suggests fund managers are only too happy to be poached, with the average tenure just two and a half years.

Scottish fund managers are participating in the game of musical chairs. Fidelity has been hiring vigorously for its new Edinburgh office, for example, and the investment director of Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP) quit in August. More recently, Nigel Bolton, head of European equities at SWIP, left the firm for Blackrock last week, taking a team of seven fund managers with him. Aberdeen Asset Management’s August purchase of a 50% stake in Glasgow Investment Managers is expected to lead to a further round of moves, as some of Glasgow’s staff are apparently unwilling to make the move east to Aberdeen’s Edinburgh office.

Richard Fletcher, managing director of Edinburgh headhunter Fletcher Jones, says Scottish fund management hiring remains unaffected by the credit crunch impacting banks globally: “We’re as busy as last year.”