Olga Ivanova, Principal Consultant for Antal Russia’s financial department
Recruitment activity in the finance sector has consistently and encouragingly grown in the last few months, especially so in the demand for financial controllers and ‘junior’ financial directors. However in four cases out of five this need to recruit had come about to replace employees who have failed to meet expectations, or those who have left the company. The irony is that the former were mainly taken on in the summer, when employers were tempted by the availability of unemployed financial professionals on the market and therefore secured their service cheaply on comparatively low salaries. However it soon became clear that these people did not have the requisite competences required, and so employers have now started to ‘overhaul’ replacing them with more appropriately qualified ones.
Encouraging too is the signs of staffing budgets for new hires increasing, and while average salaries in finance are still around 15% lower than they were before the downturn, this is the a great improvement on the spring/summer figures of a differential of up to 30% from before the downturn.
Overall the feeling is that this whole period has simply demonstrated that good employees do not become any cheaper just because of a downturn. Following a spring/summer period of attracting people with a wide range of skills for as little money as possibly, the skills gap has become clear, these individuals cannot meet the expectations and now employers must pay more, but in return can expect much greater competences. In many cases this extends to bi-lingual abilities – never an obligatory requirement for finance staff before – and the desire for a chief accountant with fluent English, German or French is typical and a reflection of the shift to improve the quality and the abilities of finance staff.
