eFinancialCareers

Good news – the sub-prime crisis isn’t affecting banks’ appetite for graduate hires – yet.

Most graduate programmes are determined a year in advance, so banks' recruiters tell us 2008’s intake will be unaffected by the meltdown in the credit markets.

Lauren Platt-Hepworth at JPMorgan says, “Nothing is changing in Australia in terms of our recruitment of graduates.”

“It doesn’t affect us,” asserts Rob White at Zurich Financial. Similarly, Deutsche says its intake for 2008 is unchanged, and both ING and ANZ confirm their enthusiasm for graduate trainees is undiminished.

“ING Australia’s recruitment won’t be affected at all by it,” says media relations manager, Peter Hansson.

It’s the same message over at Citi, which may have lost its chief exec, but Sally Kincaid, director and head of HR, markets and banking, Australia, says, “We have absolutely no intention of reducing our graduate intake at all.”

And Cleo Higgins, head of HR at Rothschild, says the graduate programme won’t be impacted.

So there you have it – banks may be writing down billions of dollars and cutting pay (in the US at least), but they’re still hungry for graduates in Australia, for the moment.