Big banks posted blowout fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, led by a growing appetite for corporate financing, institutional trading, and dealmaking — trends that could boost hiring in 2025.
JPMorgan Chase kicked off Wall Street's earnings season by reporting a 50% increase in profit, led by a 49% increase in investment-banking revenue from the previous year's fourth quarter, and double-digit growth in trading revenue. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, said profit for the three months that ended on December 31 rose by 105%, driven by demand for corporate dealmaking and capital raising. And Citigroup reported a 35% increase in investment-banking revenue for the fourth quarter from a year ago.
The robust results follow several years of sagging demand for Wall Street's bread-and-butter businesses, layoffs, lower bonuses, and an overall muted environment for job-hopping.
Now, the strong 2024 performances, particularly in trading, mean annual bonuses could be as much as 35% higher than they were a year ago. Banks have started to share the bonus numbers with employees, as Business Insider reported last week.
More broadly, Wall Street headhunters say that hiring has been picking up in select areas in recent months, including junior-banking roles and back-office tech jobs. They expect the shift to continue in 2025.
"The 45% surge in Goldman's profits and CEO David Solomon's bullish outlook on M&A signals a notable shift in the hiring market," said Meridith Dennes, a managing partner at Prospect Rock Partners, a recruiting firm. "Banks that aggressively downsized during the 2022-to-2023 slowdown are now selectively rebuilding their deal teams."
Of course, working on Wall Street could also get harder in 2025. The industry's notoriously long hours could intensify as demand for dealmaking and capital raising continues. At the same time, work-from-home options are shrinking, with JPMorgan last week telling employees on a hybrid schedule to return to the office five days a week starting in March.
Here are four trends in financial-industry hiring that could spur Wall Street job growth in 2025.
Dealmakers
Following several years of muted dealmaking, demand for mergers and acquisitions has been picking up in recent months, driven by lower borrowing costs as interest rates decline. The M&A streak is expected to continue in 2025, aided by a more business-friendly regulatory environment under President-elect Donald Trump.
The uptick is already having an effect on hiring. As BI recently reported, John Weinberg, the chairman and CEO of the elite boutique investment bank Evercore, said in December that he'd been spending an unusual amount of time on year-end hiring.
"Most of the time you don't really do much recruiting in November or December," he said at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York. "If you could see my schedule, you'd see that virtually every day I am speaking with and recruiting" new talent, he added.
As for the jobs outlook, he said, "You could probably anticipate that our recruiting efforts will increase, not decrease."
Recruiters in December told BI that they had seen surging demand for M&A bankers in industries viewed as hot for deals, including tech, healthcare, restructuring, industrials, consumer retail, and financial institutions — a trend they expect to continue this year.
Junior bankers
Demand for junior investment-banking talent has also been picking up. Dennes, the headhunter, said she was seeing especially strong demand for what she referred to as "the seasoned associate," but also for vice presidents, who tend to sit in the middle of the investment-banking pecking order.
JPMorgan Chase ramped up off-cycle hiring for junior investment bankers late last year, according to people familiar with the bank's recruitment efforts and to its online jobs board. A JPMorgan executive told BI in October that the bank was hiring across all levels of investment banking amid a bump in deal flow.
Whether the JPMorgan hiring boost will continue in 2025 remains to be seen. On Wednesday, the bank's chief financial officer, Jeremy Barnum, told investors that JPMorgan intended to keep head count flat this year, following a 2% rise in staffing in 2024. That included a 3% rise in its asset- and wealth-management unit, according to company filings.
Goldman Sachs' careers portal displayed 15 open job listings for junior bankers in New York, London, and San Francisco, namely at the analyst and associate levels. In January, one open role called for an associate to cover deals for financial institutions and asset-management clients, while another sought an IB associate to focus on the entertainment sector. A third associate position was focused on executing general mergers and acquisitions.
IT jobs
Headhunters have said an array of financial-services firms, from banks to hedge funds, are expected to boost tech hiring as they explore and build new artificial-intelligence capabilities.
In July, JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, said he expected to add thousands of AI-related jobs in the next few years. Hedge funds and proprietary-trading firms have also been getting into the act, shelling out big bucks — as much as $350,000 in annual salaries — to snag coveted AI researchers and engineers.
Recruiters told BI last year that some private-equity firms were paying up to $2 million, including base salary and bonus, for so-called AI operating executives.
See BI's top tips for landing a Wall Street tech job in 2025.
Private credit and financing
So-called private credit has been on a roll in recent years as more asset managers, like Apollo and Blackstone, pick up lending that banks increasingly deem too risky for their balance sheets.
Plus, there are signs that demand for nonbank loans will only intensify in 2025 as demand for corporate capital raising increases, including for M&A.
On Monday, Goldman Sachs announced a new structure to capitalize on growing demand for financing. Its new Capital Solutions Group is geared toward providing alternative sources of lending to corporate clients and financial sponsors.
This month, Bloomberg reported that the hedge fund Point72 hired Todd Hirsch, a former Blackstone senior managing director, to build out its new private-credit business.
Goldman on Wednesday reported record results in fixed-income and equities financing, which includes capital raising on behalf of clients. Goldman's CEO referred to financing as a "large strategic opportunity" for the bank, thanks to what he described as "important structural trends currently taking place in finance," including the emergence of private credit.
See BI's top do's and don'ts for landing a job in the burgeoning private-credit industry.
