What are the current trends in recruitment for M&A Roles?
Sectors such as travel and catering have been hit the hardest due to the pandemic, whereas other sectors like insurance broking, tech and consumer goods are doing business as usual.
From what I’ve seen, the pandemic has not affected the M&A hiring space. In fact, some businesses have thrived during these uncertain times. As a company, we’ve had to acclimatise to our clients requests and stay in touch with businesses who are struggling to support them in certain areas whether that be re-structuring internally or adding additional interim support.
We have still had the same volume of M&A roles if not more coming in. The reason for this increase in demand for M&A roles is because the role is not just focused on buying, selling or making acquisitions for the business, but offers other support such as planning short and long term strategy and financial consultation which adds value to the business. Overall, the trends for M&A hiring has been sector specific this year. You also have to remember that businesses can only be lean for so long, at some point they will need more resource.
Why is Phipps Cameron the right recruitment to use to find M&A roles?
There are a lot of recruitment agencies out there. What’s different about us is that we predominantly work on corporate development roles rather than working on advisory to advisory deals, which is what lot of recruitment firms tend to do. In short, we attract candidates who have worked in advisory, banks, PE funds and help them transition into corporate or PE backed roles.
There are many reason to why candidates move away from advisory or consulting to a corporate role. Here are some points that candidates and clients have shared with me.
Advisory vs Corporate Roles
| Advisory | Corporate Roles |
| Solely focused on advising a variety of large businesses. | It’s entrepreneurial because you’re advising and auctioning out your plans for the business. |
| Involved in a lot of processes and never get ownership of those processes. | You can take full ownership of your ideas and what the business is doing. |
| Harder to build relationships with other departments. | You can manage their M&A, Corporate Development department. |
| More transactional | You get to be part of something bigger |
| Long working hours and sometimes late nights, weekends and last minute travel plans. | Better work/life balance. More stable position. |
How have M&A roles developed during the pandemic?
Like I’ve mentioned before, M&A positions have always had a diverse function in businesses even before the pandemic occurred. So I wouldn’t say the role has developed thus far, but it has definitely needed to adapt to the economic stress.
A lot of roles were put on hold during the start of the pandemic. This is to be expected with so much uncertainty. However, as 2020 has continued the volume of roles (especially at the more junior level) are back to normal.