"These are the kinds of firms where you show up after being hired and find you don't have a desk even though you're being guaranteed $500K a year. The guy who hired you is fired a week after you join and a month later your entire business unit is closed down.

The details of what drives hiring through "executive recruiters" at Wall Street firms is something I am aware of from a first hand point of view, from both sides of the equation. It's a part of life that Kafka would love."

it's not uncommon for financial firms (including hedge funds) to fake hiring as a proof that they are not under distress. they were doing it across the board after the dotcom crash. they were willing to pay tickets, hotel rooms and the like... boosting image and extraction of information are reasons why sometimes they claim they have an opening when they don't.

It's one thing to parade a few people through a process and quite another to extend offers to and hire people. Firms do not just hire people and have them do nothing so it looks like they are doing well.

that is frightening -- sounds like enron manufacturing fake trading floors for investor walk throughs...

Waverly, that is exactly what many law firms did with regards to this years summer class.

There's no such thing a expecting to be flat year over year on Wall Street. You can't walk into your manager's office and tell him/her you're not growing profit/revenue in 2010. You do that and you're fired. So every manager goes to the budget meeting with their number of new hires needed to grow the business. If the business doesn't grow and the manager doesn't meet his budget, people get fired, a new business plan is written up and the cycle continues for 2011. If the business is successful half the people quit anyway because some other firm heard that so-and-so firm was killing it in such-and-such a market and they want to steal some of their people away. Another dirty trick is to pretend to be looking for someone when all you want is information about what the other guys are doing, what strategies they're using, how much money they're making.

Normally something like 25% of Wall Street employees move around every year."Executive Recruiters" are the middlemen who help these Wall Streeters move around from firm to firm. Sometimes they deal with the rocket science types but this tends to be a niche market with very few hires every year.

Wall Street hiring is a game of musical chairs. Goldman->Morgan->BarcLehs->Citi->BAC... If what you say is true the ex Wall streeters sitting around doing nothing can start thinking about getting back into the game.

Nobody is hiring you to take risk/build a business/make serious money unless you are a known player. Although the opposite happens. The CISCO analyst at Morgan will become CISCO's COO but the COO from CISCO can't get a job buffing knobs at Goldman.

waverly - thanks for the up to date color on the job market. question on the staffing market - how much of the staffing "arbitrage" is health care related? (clearly for lower end jobs). trying to understand the effects on the public staffing companies.

"Where's the 20-30% collapse on NYC housing forecast by the bears here in Spring of this year?

MOST OF YOU DON'T HAVE A CLUE."

ROTFL..... the guy yelling that others don't have a clue is the one who missed that we have exactly the specific collapse he's denying!

Dude, don't you read the newspapers or anything?