Why are some non-competes being tightened when finance job turnover has collapsed?

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“Once is luck, twice a coincidence, but three times is enemy action”, as James Bond said. On that basis, it appears that financial sector employers might be up to something.

Jefferies, Man Group and Citadel have all, in different ways, tightened their use of non-compete clauses or extended gardening leave provisions in their employees contracts. Why the sudden interest in job security?

Historically, although loyalty is a virtue, the investment banking industry has always accepted that its most valuable assets leave the building every evening and don’t always come back. Bankers are there for a good time, not a long time, and since the industry uses redundancies to manage the business cycle, it can’t really make much of a claim on anyone’s long term future. 

But when you start looking, there are lots examples of companies which have historically made a virtue out of the flexibility of the financial labour market suddenly becoming a bit more protective. 

The entire private equity industry, for example, had to give up on its recruitment effort this year when the bulge bracket investment banks decided they were no longer going to tolerate having their junior bankers systematically poached. This isn’t exactly “enemy action”, but there’s a reason why it’s happening, and it probably has something to do with this:

As every recruitment stock that’s reported this year has told us, staff turnover in the banking industry has fallen to all time lows, and then kept falling. 

It seems that there has been a sudden outbreak of loyalty in the traditionally feckless world of investment banking from the employees as well as the employers. Elsewhere, banks like UBS — which had hoped to use “natural attrition” to drive their planned headcount reduction — have found themselves significantly undershooting and had to make compulsory redundancies.  

It has the weird consequence that the hedge fund managers who are getting the most job offers are the ones with big losses, because they are the only people who might be interested in moving jobs if it means they can start again with a new high-water mark.

The two sides feed into each other, of course. The underlying driver of unusually low turnover from the employee side seems to be that despite the rising market, investment bankers don’t feel all that optimistic. According to the eFinancialCareers Hiring Trends Report:

.?.?. Candidates are still much more risk-averse than employers. There appears to be a material mismatch between candidate expectations and demands, and the going market rate which firms are prepared to pay. Many candidates are simply refusing to consider alternative career moves at this point in the cycle.

And this feeds into employer attitudes too. After all, who is more likely to be risk averse about changing career — good employees or mediocre ones? 

In an environment where almost nobody wants to make a job move, the only people moving will therefore be those who have been made a truly impressive offer. And these tend to be exactly the ones you don’t want to lose — people like the private equity secondaries team at Jefferies, or research quants at Man Group and Citadel. Which is why the most in-demand employees are finding the golden handcuffs are being tightened.