"I'm a 41-year-old unemployed niche quant. The job market has never been worse"
I am looking for some advice. I lost my job at a major bank in London last year, and I have become invisible.
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I've applied for endless jobs over the past 12 months, and I have heard nothing. This is the worst hiring market I have ever experienced. I was last looking for a job after the financial crisis, and it was nowhere near as bad as this.
I am a quant trader. I work in a niche area of the market, and I am good at what I do and have well over a decade of experience. When I was cut, I appreciated that I would need to apply for a lot of jobs, but I presumed that experience would act in my favour. In fact, the opposite is the case.
As banks squeeze costs, they don't want to employ someone like me. They want to employ someone young and cheap. This is why everyone let go on my desk was either a managing director or a director. It's about doing more with less.
I've tried to make myself more employable. I can code, and I've taken courses in AI. At one point, I got through to a third round of job interviews but after four hours of interviews with traders and co-heads, I heard nothing at all. I was completely ghosted and then I saw they'd hired a junior instead. Aside from the fact that juniors don't have experience of dealing with highly volatile and illiquid markets, I have no problem with hiring them. But for the recruiter simply not to ignore my emails was simply rude.
On top of this, the longer I'm out of the market, the more I see that recruiters are themselves struggling and are engaged in the dubious practice of posting jobs that don't really exist. I keep seeing the same job posted over and over again, a few months apart. Initially, I applied to it. Now, I know it's not real.
Pierre Bourque is a pseudonym
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