A good banker is too easy to find

The carnage on Wall Street has created a major churn in Mumbai’s financial job market, with NRIs and Indians competing for shrinking opportunities even as
corporates look to ‘upgrade’  their workforce, writes G Sampath

 Amidst all the turmoil on Wall Street, someone seems to have forgotten to update the Lehman Brothers’ website. Two weeks after they filed for bankruptcy, and five days after 750 employees in their UK offices were laid off, the ‘Career’ section proclaims, “Build a career with us. Around the world, the Lehman Brothers team is growing”.
The irony is not lost on Milind Srivastav, 26, a member of the back office team in Lehman’s Powai office. His CV, along with those of hundreds of the Lehman fraternity, is floating like plankton in the increasingly choppy waters of the Indian job market.

When Srivastav joined Lehman a year ago, this was the last thing he would have expected. He was taken on at Rs5 lakh per annum. Soon after he joined, he was sent on training to the US for a month. “The stock was at $70, we were setting up a new team, and had ample support from our US counterparts.” In other words, life couldn’t have been better. “If you were with Lehman, you had arrived.” One year down the line, Srivastav’s workplace is more like a waiting room for the soon-to-be departed. While Japanese investment bank Nomura has bought out the revenue side of Lehman’s Asia business, the back office concern is still up for grabs. Talks are on with buyers, with Wipro being touted as one of the front-runners. In the meantime, the 1,900-strong staff, who were put on notice three weeks ago, are now being persuaded, coaxed, and some say even harassed, to hang on for a month before they leave, so that the company gets a better price. So, while the big bosses haggle in the boardroom, people like Srivastav go to work, drink cups of coffee, and attempt to cope with the fear and uncertainty by playing computer games. Since mobile phones don’t work inside the Lehman office, they come out into the street now and then, to make phone calls to placement agencies.

“This collapse came as quite a shock for the middle and junior-level people. In fact, Lehman was hiring till recently,” says Smitha Thomas, who quit Lehman six months ago, “just in time.”

Srivastav echoes her view. “It was a major blow. It took time before the feeling actually sunk in. Then we saw colleagues quitting and farewell parties became a regular feature in the office. The overall scenario is rather gloomy at the moment.” And it is only going to get worse so far as the job scene is concerned. Placement agencies have been flooded with CVs from Lehman, and its partner in collapse, DSP Merill Lynch. At the same time, the NRI techies who are on the verge of being offloaded by the biggies of Wall Street are also mailing their CVs to Indian placement agencies.

“There is definitely an over-supply of CVs. Nearly 2,000 people entering the job market in a single week is too much of a crowd,” says a headhunter on condition of anonymity, as Lehman is one of his clients.

“More than bankers, it will be techies who will bear the brunt of the meltdown,” says Suresh Nagaraj, an NRI investment banker who works on Wall Street with Citigroup.

“For every banker, there are three IT guys who take care of support functions like
programming, networking, trading platforms, etc. I work directly in the markets. But unlike me, most NRIs in the financial sector work on the technology side. Given the current uncertainty, they will definitely be looking at returning to India.”

With the returning NRI techies on one side, and the expensive CVs being offloaded within India by companies like Lehman and Merrill Lynch on the other, is the finance/IT sector in for a major job crunch?

“The BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) domain can expect a 10 per cent lay-off over the next two years,” says Anita Ramachandran, CEO, Cerebrus, an HR consultancy. R Sankar, head of HR consulting practice at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, concurs. “Many Indian companies and several sectors are already under pressure in India because of the US meltdown. So they will go slow on recruitment. Secondly, with highly qualified talent such as the Lehman ones being available in excess, Indian companies will proactively recalibrate their workforce.”

Meaning? “Throw out the bottom 10 per cent, the underperformers, and take on high achievers at a lower pay.”

In other words, if you are a techie employed in a company whose revenue stream is in any way connected with any of the Wall Street behemoths, get set for a period of prolonged belt-tightening. Kumar Krishnan of Prospect Partners, an executive search firm, sums it all up rather neatly: “We will see a fair amount of consolidation happening.

When there is consolidation, there will be duplication of roles and work, and so redundancies. Also, the reverse brain drain of NRIs returning to India has been a trend for more than a year now. The Wall Street crisis has only accelerated this process. But unlike in the past, there won’t be fancy sign-ons or salary hikes. Given the excess supply, and the overall slowdown, opportunities for the average job seeker will shrink.”

With inputs from Brian de Souza and Pooja Sarkar. Some names of people interviewed have been changed at their request.            
sampath@dnaindia.net