Senior Moves Across All Sectors, Q1 2023

Increased activity in the US drove increase in senior moves year-on-year, with the exception of Wealth & Asset Management

TALNT is a proprietary AI-driven platform for tracking executive moves, which gathers and analyses all publicly-announced senior moves sourced from 3000+ reputable public sources around the globe.

This insights report reviews the biggest hiring trends within senior roles across all sectors globally. It will compare publicly available data to tell the story of what’s going on a quarterly basis. What year-on-year trends will we see and how significant are they for the year ahead?

Senior level hiring sees higher overall numbers and more variety in Q1 2023 compared with the same period last year

The first and most obvious trend to note from the available statistics is how much more hiring we’ve seen this quarter compared with Q1last year. The chart for Q1 2022 looks like a steady downward trend, whereas this quarter has seen three clear peaks.

Taking a closer look at this from a regional perspective:

We can see that most of the data shows peaks of senior hiring activity in the Americas.

When we compared that with the same period last year:

It suggests more hiring in every region in Q1 this year compared with last, although as usual, reflecting a slight bias in the publicly available sources, we’re seeing consistently more reporting on senior hires in the US compared with other markets.

On that basis, these two charts seem to suggest a much more vibrant and healthy talent market in North America this year compared with the first three months of 2022. Might this be showing signs of economic recovery after almost a year of constant fears about global recession?

Sector-wise, this chart looks like a lot of spaghetti. It’s a little hard to make out the major trends in this form, but when we add a bar chart of the same information:

We can see a healthy mix of hiring into senior roles across all sectors in Q1 this year. This is significant, because a quick glance at the same charts for Q1 last year shows a very different picture:

This line chart for Q1 2022 shows the dominance of the Wealth& Asset Management sector in terms of senior hires. What the charts reveal about that quarter compared to the same period this year is…

That although hiring at senior level in the Wealth &Asset Management sector is down significantly year-on-year, hiring in all other sectors has increased significantly. Software, for example, shows a 249%increase year-on-year. Insurance senior hires are up 74% in the same period, while Tech Service senior appointments are up 171%.

The chart for Q1 2023 suggests a much healthier economy than the same period last year, with all sectors benefitting – besides Wealth &Asset Management, which is down, and FinTech, which is at roughly the same level (304 senior hires in Q1 2023 vs 292 in Q1 2022).

CEO hires have doubled year-on-year

The next interesting trend is in which senior roles have proved most popular. Looking at the data for last quarter, we see that CEO is the most popular senior role to hire for, followed by Director.

When we look at the same period last year, we see a quite different pattern – a comparative lack of appetite for hiring CEOs:

We can see that in Q1 2022, only one third the number ofCEOs were appointed as in the same period this year – 117 globally versus 349.Again, however, the numbers hired into all senior roles have increased in Q12023 compared with last year. We can see a 114% increase in the number of CFOs hired year-on-year, a 48% increase in Managing Director hires, and a 75%increase in COO hires.

There seems to have been a sharp rise in interest in hiring into key strategic roles across the board, driven largely by the US talent market.

Taking a deeper dive into which companies have been hiring the most senior talent may give us some more insight:

This chart shows overall senior moves, including people who have left senior roles. From this we can see that Wealth & Asset Management firms have seen the highest concentration of moves. However, many of these will reflect the turmoil in the sector following the bankruptcy and acquisition of CreditSuisse. This, along with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the US, sent ripples through the industry, and we can see in the chart that the top ten in dominated by banks in the Wealth & Asset Management space.

Let’s compare this with the same period last year:

In all honesty, this chart shows very little difference in the overall trends. This suggests that Wealth & Asset Management firms are always likely to dominate this list because the biggest companies in the sector are simply so large that they have a distorting effect on the global numbers across sectors.

These numbers also suggest that the sector may be more concentrated than others, since Wealth & Asset Management hiring was the only sector to see a significant drop in hires in Q1 2023 y-o-y.