Salaries that are fixed in Euros or Dollars are typically those where clients and business partners are often paying in those currencies, for instance at law, finance or consulting firms, especially where there is international work being done, and therefore international payments.  In these cases high level professionals and executives might have all or part of their compensation tagged to a currency other than the ruble.  

Overall, we do not see the falling ruble affecting wage negotiations at this time.  Most hiring being done this year is ‘key hiring’, meaning mostly for important roles to the company, be it replacement or new position/new growth hiring. This particular type of hiring is still seeing, at times, up to a 20% increase in compensation.  For ‘non-key hiring’, companies can negotiate a decrease in compensation, the same as the candidate currently has at their current employer, or a nominal increase.  The majority of job seekers do not change their employer due to compensation issues, instead lack of employee engagement, poor management, and lack of opportunities, drive resignations.

There may be some draining of talent and emigration on the market currently, but I am not sure how much different it would be from the norm, as many of the World’s economies are also weakened.   During a weakened economy, as we are currently experiencing, there is less competition to retain talent as there is with employees to retain their employment.  These are the times employees need to focus on putting heightened effort into their work and performance.

We expect recruitment in the Russian banking sector to remain stagnant as a result of sanctions.  Asian banks will have a competitive advantage over American and European banks, and we expect there to be a continued focus on hiring of both Russian and foreign specialists for risk management, compliance, treasury and financial institutions relations.  

We see a number of major banks on the market, both Russian and foreign, focusing on risk management and internal control in efforts to strengthen their positions in their market segments.  In retail banking we are also seeing the launching of new products.  The recruitment activity in Investment banking is minimized, and we expect that slow down to hold through year end.