Latest articles
How to ask for a pay rise when your bank has frozen hiring and is sacking your colleagues
With not as many external vacancies around as last year, you could be stuck in your current job and have to negotiate with your boss if you want a pay rise. Here’s a guide to handling those awkward internal salary discussions. Justification Paul Heng, founder and managing director of NeXT Career Consulting Group Asia, says [...]
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GUEST COMMENT: What to expect from your mind when you are made redundant
Losing a job is incredibly stressful, and living under the threat of losing a job is almost as bad. Even if you still have your job, reading the papers and picking up word about upcoming redundancies at the firm you work has an adverse effect. As far as our brain is concerned, being under threat [...]
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Risk, retrenchments and the reluctant job seeker: A review of the Japan job market in 2011
Here’s our look at the year that was in Japan. Risky business One key 2011 trend is the rising demand for talent in risk, compliance, audit and internal control. John McCrohon, finance director of Robert Walters Japan, says: “We have seen an increase in regulatory scrutiny and risk management requirements within the banking and finance [...]
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Macquarie Capital’s Kalpana Desai’s seven steps to career success as a woman in banking
Last week the top-20 women in Asian banking and finance were celebrated at a lunch in Singapore organised by FinanceAsia and The Financial Women’s Association of Singapore. One of those honoured, Kalpana Desai, Macquarie Capital’s head of Asia, honed in on career issues. During the panel discussion, Desai, who took on her current role in [...]
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Guest Comment: If your job hunt’s in a slump, take a look at yourself before you blame your recruiter
There’s sometimes criticism from candidates on this site and others about the quality of service you’ll receive from recruitment consultants. Much of this criticism is justified. Recruitment is a sales-based industry which works on behalf of clients, not job seekers. We manage candidates who are at particularly vulnerable stages of their lives when they are [...]
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Been fired? A Heidrick & Struggles headhunter is here to help
Unlike hiring announcements, layoffs are never huge PR exercises for financial firms. But although cuts in Asia haven’t been massive (so far), at least compared with in the US and Europe, firing is indeed going on steadily and stealthily. If you’ve been unfortunately let go, here’s some sound advice from Hong-Kong based headhunter Marie Quismorio [...]
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Japanese recruitment bright spot alert: FX in Tokyo
UBS has made the news again, albeit for less shocking reasons than the rouge trading scandal or the resignation of its top bankers. The Swiss bank hired several executive directors for its foreign exchange desk in Tokyo. Toshimasa Fujii, formerly of Barclays Bank, is now head of e-commerce sales; John Shen-Nagakura from Société Générale has [...]
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No longer last on the list: Contracting in Japan’s financial sector is experiencing new-found popularity
Contracting has never been conventionally popular with Japan’s finance professionals, but increasingly this seems to be changing. There’s been a greater receptiveness to hiring contractors over the last two months, says a recruiter we spoke to. Demand poised to jump 20 per cent Contracting is becoming more popular largely because there are more hiring freezes [...]
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Tricky interview question: How good are you?
The following took place during an interview for a graduate technology position at a global bank… What the interviewer said It was the final interview round and I had answered a lot of the technical questions quite well. I think perhaps the lead interviewer sensed that I was becoming too confident and he tried to [...]
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Six ways to work well with recruiters
1) More is not better Contact a minimum of three and an absolute maximum of six recruiters – any more and you risk losing control of your job search, with different recruiters sending out your CV for the same vacancy. That’s something banks really hate. 2) Get specialist The recruiters you deal with should specialise [...]
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