Morning Coffee: The HSBC job that people might feel insulted by being asked to interview for. Traders punish their bosses for mediocre bonuses

efinancialcareers.com:

One of the most annoying things that can ever happen to a banker is to suspect, halfway through an interview process, that the decision has already been made and you are just being put through the hoops.  Consequently, although the search consultants retained by HSBC to find a replacement for Noel Quinn are being asked to consider external candidates “to benchmark” the merits of Nuno Rato and George Elhedery, they might find it difficult to persuade many senior global bankers that it’s worth their while to update a resume.

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Anyone who feels tempted to meet the board and spend an afternoon on some PowerPoint slides might be advised to bear a few things in mind.  Things like – Mark Tucker wants to “wrap up the selection by the end of the year”, so a candidate with a notice or gardening leave period starts at a disadvantage.  The chair and directors are apparently happy with the current strategy, so they’re not necessarily all that interested in a fresh set of ideas from outside.  And apparently Elhedery spent some of his sabbatical learning Mandarin, which would make him the first HSBC CEO to speak the language of its second home market.

So, it seems most likely that the search firm will find one or two people who owe them a favour, a couple who want the interview practice and to make their current boss nervous and perhaps a temporarily unemployed star banker or someone passed over for the top job at another bank, then make an internal appointment.  It’s not like the last process, in which Jean-Pierre Mustier remained a genuine possibility right up to the final decision.

Separately, when financial services employers stumble, it’s almost always because they failed to