“High flying bankers told to cut back” screams the headline in a recent Business Times story. The article talks about how bankers are now told to fly economy class and do their own laundry and to forgo all those free spas. Well, that’s certainly not new. In every downturn, firms are told to cut back on these same things, directives which are then thrown out of the window once the boom times return.
What’s interesting to note in the article is a quote -“Some banks have introduced staff referral programs instead of going to <traditional channels>”. We are certainly fans of internal referral programs - that’s how we got the idea of Vawch in the first place. Let’s hope this means that recruiters would be more responsive to such programs in the future.
The issue regarding the structured products that DBS and a host of other banks distributed to Singaporeans is an interesting one.
I never spent too much time thinking about it but was forced to over dinner yesterday when my friend’s mum asked me what I thought - “after saying that the banks should compensate the buyers of the asset”.
For several seconds I deliberated: should I prematurely end the conversation and just agree with her or should I highlight reasons why that might not be a “fair” outcome.
Okay, it didn’t take me several seconds . . . it was more like half a second. Now if my understanding is correct, the likes of DBS were only responsible for distributing the Lehman product. Now that everything has gone pear shaped, is it really fair to shareholders if these banks are “encouraged” to return the principal amounts back to the buyers of this security? These distributing banks only made a distribution fee and now they have to bailout Lehman’s liability. . .
Before the flaming starts, let me be clear that I’m not against returning money to the investors who were deceived. I just want to highlight that the issue is not as clear cut as it seems and there are justifiable arguments why these distributing banks shouldn’t be liable for these minibonds.
DBS is trading at ~$11 . . . crazy isn’t it? I reckon we are either going to see either UOB or OCBC tank over the next few weeks or see DBS bounce back to trade at multiples comparable to the two other listed peers.
It is hard not to be affected by all this gloom and doom. Job cuts here and there, hiring freeze, lower consumer spending etc … Today’s Straits Times had a whole 2 pages on the man on the street voicing their concerns over the impending recession. Even my friends are talking about bunkering down in preparation for the coming disaster.
However, as with irrational exuberance in the past few years (especially in Singapore in the past year - the mantra being IR, F1 etc. etc.) we are potentially swinging to irrational pessimism. Certainly, the situation is rather dire with regards to the financial system but I hope the real businesses which create value (unlike the bankers) will pull us through, of course, with some needed financing (which is still rather tight).
As for Vawch, we are struggling as well trying to create something in the middle of this turmoil. We have narrowed down our options on a change of strategy to hopefully see us through this period.
Today is pay day . . .
1) We got paid - We’ve managed to provide a candidate to fill an Investment Banking Associate (Metals & Mining) role. While it took some time, I believe it worked out really well for both our client and candidate.
- Our client signed up a really talented candidate. Our candidate wasn’t actively looking for jobs when Vawch touched base with him; in fact I was honestly quite surprised he hadn’t been approached by other headhunters. Perhaps this supports our hypothesis that referrals do indeed throw up passive candidates.
- The candidate joins a bank in a bigger capacity with the opportunity to take on new responsibilities. I’m pretty sure he also appreciates the job security since this bank has come through relatively unscath by the recent financial meltdown.
2) You got paid - We are going to process some payments today. We’ll be paying out three S$100 payments to our referrers for successful referring candidates who were interviewed in-person by our clients. Thank you for you referrals: Joel, Tammy and Ming. You should be receiving your cheque in the mail shortly (we’ll be sending it to the address you signed up with).
3) New Payments Role - One of our client is looking for a Director to lead its Payments operations. Know any transaction banking friends? Perhaps they might be able to help you with the expected bounty of ~$10,500.
On another note, we’ve been working on a couple of new features for Vawch and will be adding them over the next few weeks. I’m sure some of you have noticed, we’ve just added a comments functionality. We hope this will help faciliate conversations / clarifications between our referrers, our clients and us!
Ben and I have been keeping tabs on the financial turmoil over the past few days and mulling over its impact on our business. We had signed up a new banking client about 2 weeks ago but unfortunately over the course of these past 2 weeks that particular financial institution has itself gotten into trouble and thus we are not putting much hopes on getting them to work with us anytime soon. As we call other potential customers, we hear a similar refrain - “we are not planning to hire that many people this year and hence we would rather stick to existing channels”.
We live in extraordinary times. Although we had expected that things would slow down over the course of the year when started, we didn’t expect this kind of implosion of the financial services industry. Although we still see headhunters posting many jobs on boards like efinancialcareers, we think they are also doing a bit of harvesting - i.e. putting up jobs to build their databases.
Watch out for this channel as we try to figure out how to penetrate the market in this turmoil.
We have had a rough couple of days as we tried to map out the strategies that we could take to accelerate the growth of our platform. There aren’t many levers to pull - we think it takes old-fashioned word-of-mouth, successes and faith (from our employers and members) for us to reach the vision that we initially had for this particular business. In the process, however, we did manage to bring more clarity to the initial vision that we have for our marketplace.
What’s our vision? We see Vawch as a global jobs referral exchange (or Ebay for jobs if you like) where employers post their high-value positions and individuals (be it recruitment professionals or amateurs) forward their best candidates for the job (filtered and vouched for of course!). I, personally, have always been amazed at how inefficient the job market is. You don’t really hear about the best positions out there - you have to call many headhunters to find what’s available or hope that a headhunter calls you at the opportune time. Headhunters would call people in their databases to quickly match these positions and even though someone might be a good fit, that person may never get called.
Shouldn’t there be a better way to get these jobs out there - especially to those who are not actively looking at that point in time but open to new opportunities? And at the same time pass any cost savings from increased efficiencies to the employer? Is Vawch the platform for this - maybe (we certainly hope so) but that’s at least what we are aiming for.
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