Wall Street's Hiring Sea-Change That Could Take It Back 30 Years

From BusinessInsider: Wall Street vets like to tell stories about the bad old days when traders sweat on each other in the pit, and back office number crunchers could fight their way to becoming front office analysts. In the past few decades, though, that's basically faded away. The traders have been replaced by computers, and Wall Street's big bulge bracket banks (like JP Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs) have found their new recruits at target schools — the Ivy League, Stanford, and MIT. Since then, employees in the back and mid-office have been told that they're staying exactly where they are…… Now, however, Wall Streeters have told us that all that is changing, and banks are taking a look at what their back and mid-office employees can do……. "If you believe business has changed and the biggest expense is compensation, it makes all the sense in the world," said Sallie Krawcheck, a former executive at Merrill Lynch and Smith & Barney. According to Krawcheck, there are three ways Wall Street banks can reduce compensation costs — layoffs, pay cuts for existing workers, and/or hiring a work force that costs less…… Cutting pay for existing workers by 10-20% is a painful process, so why not find people within the firm who want to advance, and have lower expectations about compensation?............................................................................................................ Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-hiring-within-firms-2012-10