JPMorgan Is Boosting Its Junior-Banker Ranks
- JPMorgan is ramping up its hiring of investment-banking analysts and associates.
- The bank recently limited work hours for juniors and reported a 31% jump in deal fees.
- The fourth quarter is usually a slow period of hiring for investment banks.
A much-anticipated investment-banking rebound has yet to fully materialize — but that’s not stopping America’s biggest bank from staffing up.
JPMorgan Chase is amid an off-cycle hiring spree for junior investment bankers, according to people familiar with the bank’s recruitment efforts and to its online jobs board. The bank recently rolled out parameters to protect its analysts and associates from burnout and reported a big jump in its dealmaking fees.
JPMorgan has posted about nine new roles for investment-banking analysts and associates on its website in the past two weeks, seeking talent for teams that advise on mergers and acquisitions for financial institutions and healthcare companies, as well as for its equity-capital-markets division, which advises on IPOs.
A person who was recently asked to recommend talent to the bank said the firm was also aggressively ramping up junior-banker hiring on its M&A team, which works with sector experts on mergers and acquisitions. This person requested anonymity to protect their relationships within the bank.
An industry headhunter told Business Insider that online job postings tend to offer a limited view of investment-banking hiring because Wall Street does a lot of its recruiting through internal referrals and via internal and external headhunters. Indeed, JPMorgan’s careers page also recently posted two positions for internal investment-banking recruiters, presumably to help hire more bankers.
A JPMorgan executive familiar with the firm’s hiring efforts said the ramp-up was the result of overall growth and deal flow — not the bank’s new policies to protect junior bankers from burnout. Wall Street dealmakers just had one of their brightest quarters in three years, and JPMorgan was a big benefactor: Its investment-banking fees shot up by 31% in the third quarter over last year.
The executive also said the bank had been hiring across all levels of investment banking this year. JPMorgan’s website shows posts for two vice presidents on the M&A team, among other more-senior investment-banking jobs.
What makes the hiring unusual is its “off-cycle” timing. The pipeline for early-career investment bankers is highly structured and systematic. Banks get a new crop of first-year analysts every summer, usually in July. Getting that job, however, usually requires snagging a summer internship with one’s future investment-bank employer, a process that often starts in the sophomore year of college. The pipeline for associates is similarly regimented, consisting mainly of former analysts who were promoted or direct MBA hires. Off-season hiring from other banks isn’t unheard of, but it tends to be limited.
JPMorgan recently said it would cap junior bankers’ weekly work hours at 80, with key exceptions. It also created an HR role specifically to oversee junior bankers’ well-being.
Hundred-hour workweeks have become ubiquitous in the high-pressure industry, and there was a renewed outcry about junior bankers’ working conditions following the death of an associate at Bank of America in May.
That month, JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, said the bank’s executives were assessing news of the death and asking, “What can we learn from it?” Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported on JPMorgan’s new policies, which mark the boldest yet by a bulge-bracket bank to mitigate concerns about the industry’s grueling work culture.
The hiring follows a yearslong lull in dealmaking that made investment-banking jobs even more competitive than usual. The first six months of 2024 were “painstakingly slow” in bank hiring, said the investment-banking-industry headhunter, who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. In the past month or two, however, he has seen a big increase in clients looking to hire bankers.
“The lateral recruiting market in Q4 is typically one of the slowest,” the recruiter said. “But firms are capitalizing on the uptick in deal activity.”
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