The Second Hire

Most desk build-outs start with the same question: who can we get to bring in the revenue? It's a reasonable place to begin. It is also, more often than not, the wrong first question.

The harder one is the order in which the seats get filled. In the teams we recruit for across London and Paris, that order is rarely something anyone has argued about. It tends to be inherited from the last build out, which inherited it from the one before. Fixing what was there before you is not the best use of your new rainmaker's time.

That matters more this year than it has for a while, because the market is seemingly pulling in two directions at once.

Fewer people moving, more work coming

Advertised hiring has thinned out. UK job postings on Indeed sit around 27% below their February 2020 level and roughly 13% down on a year ago. Banking and finance has followed this trend: Indeed's index for the sector stood at 85 in late July, against a pre-pandemic baseline of 100.

Deal expectations point the other way. In Vlerick Business School's latest M&A Monitor, 56% of the 158 specialists surveyed expect more transactions in 2026, and nearly a third expect volumes to grow by more than 10%. Financial buyers are the more optimistic of the two camps.

Put those together, and anyone building a new business unit or sector coverage team this year is building one in a market where the workload is rising and the people worth hiring are mostly staying put. In the UK, the ratio of unemployed people to vacancies has reached 2.6, its highest since early 2021. There is no shortage of available candidates. There is a shortage of movement among the ones you would actually want.

Time to hire tells the same story. US data shows it fell sharply during the post-pandemic scramble and has since given all of that back, landing roughly where it was in early 2019. The underlying driver is simple enough: when fewer people resign, every seat takes longer to fill. Yet build-out plans still tend to assume around six weeks a seat, an assumption that stopped holding some time ago.

The default build

The standard sequence looks much the same wherever you go. Hire the producer, give them a budget and eighteen months, and let them build out under themselves. Execution capability, product specialists, the associate bench and the operational people come last, on the logic that nobody should pay for infrastructure until the revenue justifies it.

It sounds prudent. In practice it has a fairly predictable way of going wrong.

A producer turns relationships into mandates. It takes a team to turn those mandates into fees, and fees into something that outlasts whoever brought them in. Hold back the second and third hires, and the senior person ends up doing the execution themselves. We have watched this happen more than once in London: the producer arrives in March and by October is still building the models late into the evening while the origination diary quietly empties. As David Packard says, 'Marketing is far too important to be left to the marketing department'.

Research from outside banking points the same way. Vlerick looked at 183 fast-growing firms, on average about three and a half years old, and scored them on organisational maturity. They were strongest on product quality, the part clients see, at 69%. They were weakest on what Vlerick calls sales replicability, the ability to do the same thing well a second time, at 38%. The firms with the most aggressive hiring plans scored lowest of all. Vlerick's own conclusion is that businesses which chase growth before codifying how they work tend to scale their mistakes along with their successes.

Banks are not start-ups, but a new desk behaves a lot like one. Hire origination and defer execution, and you end up with a very good shop window and not much in the stockroom.

Where deals get lost now

The case for execution depth has got stronger, while build-out templates have stayed put. Multiples have held up, at 6.4 times EBITDA on average in Vlerick's survey, while leverage has risen from 2.9 to 3.4 times. The figure that stood out to us was a different one: 49% of deals in 2025 closed below the initial offer price, against 27% a decade earlier.

The survey does not say why. Our own view, from the desks we know, is that a good share of that slippage happens in diligence and execution rather than in origination. If that is right, it is worth asking which seat on a new desk is actually defending the price.

When the rainmaker should come first

None of this is a case for always hiring the other way round. Someone with a genuinely portable franchise, clients ready to follow and two or three execution people willing to join within the quarter is a different proposition. Insisting on building the team first would simply lose them. And a desk full of capable infrastructure with no origination is just a well run cost centre.

The point is narrower. The order should be a decision someone has actually made and can defend, with a named second and third hire attached, before the first offer letter goes out.

A useful test: think back to your last build out and try to name the second and third hires after the producer and what each was there to do. If that takes a while, the order probably was not chosen.

Starting with the map

Sequencing only works if you know who exists at every level of the market you are entering, not just the four or five senior names everyone already knows. The people who make a desk work are usually further down. The Paris VP who has quietly closed a string of cross-border deals and never returns a recruiter's call. The associate bench at a competitor that is about to lose its team lead. Neither shows up in an application, because neither is looking.

So before deciding who to hire first, it pays to understand where the capability actually sits at each level. Then the seats can be filled in the order the revenue needs, rather than the order the market happens to make easy.

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Sources

• Indeed Hiring Lab, February 2026 UK Labour Market Update, February 2026
• Indeed Hiring Lab, Banking and Finance Job Postings on Indeed in the United Kingdom, July 2026
• Indeed Hiring Lab, The Surprising Relationships Between Economic Trends and Time to Hire, May 2025
• Vlerick Business School, M&A Monitor 2026, April 2026
• Vlerick Business School, Rising Star Monitor 2025, December 2025
• Vlerick Business School, Why scaling up is not the same as growth, January 2026

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