Why Private Bankers “Don’t” Engage – The Impact of High Street Recruitment

Recently, I was catching up with a senior banker I’ve known for many years. A Managing Director, running a coverage market for a major European platform. We’ve worked together before, we stay in touch regularly, and our conversations are rarely about moving roles. They’re about perspective. Market shifts. What’s really happening beyond the headlines.

At one point she glanced at her phone, almost instinctively, and said something that stayed with me.

She told me that in an average week she receives well over a dozen unsolicited approaches from recruiters. Most of them are generic. Many are poorly targeted. Almost none demonstrate any understanding of her role, her franchise, or the complexity of the decisions she would need to make to move.

What struck me wasn’t frustration. It was indifference.

And that indifference is becoming widespread.

Across wealth management and private banking, many of the strongest Relationship Managers, Team Heads and Market Leads are no longer “passive candidates”. They are actively disengaged from recruitment conversations altogether.

Not because they lack ambition. Not because they are immovable. But because the quality of engagement has deteriorated so significantly that the signal has been drowned out by noise.

Over time, wealth recruitment has drifted away from being a specialist discipline and towards being a volume-driven commercial activity. As demand for senior private banking talent has increased, so too has the number of firms and individuals positioning themselves as experts in the space.

In theory, competition should raise standards. In practice, the opposite has happened.

Senior bankers now find themselves on the receiving end of templated outreach, recycled job narratives, and speculative introductions that lack context or credibility. Platforms are pitched without regard for internal constraints. Roles are presented without an understanding of client mix, booking centres, credit appetite, or internal politics.

This isn’t just ineffective. It is wearing people down.

From the banker’s perspective, it creates fatigue and scepticism. From the bank’s perspective, it creates a false sense of market coverage while quietly narrowing access to the very people they most want to engage.

When experienced bankers stop taking calls, it doesn’t mean the talent has disappeared. It means it has chosen silence.

This has broader implications, particularly for HR and hiring managers.

I often hear that “the market is tight” or that “good people are hard to reach”. In reality, many are reachable, just not through industrialised recruitment tactics. The more senior and nuanced the role, the more important judgement, timing, and discretion become.

Search at this level has never been about broadcasting opportunities. It has always been about earned access. About knowing when to speak, and when not to. About understanding the difference between curiosity and intent.

That distinction matters commercially.

Recently, I found myself in a conversation with a bank focused heavily on fee sensitivity. The discussion centred on what other agencies were willing to accept, rather than what the role itself demanded. It was framed as pragmatism. Market norms. Cost control.

What was overlooked was the real question: what are you actually paying for?

At senior levels, fees are not about effort or volume. They reflect access, credibility, and judgement built over time. They reflect the ability to engage individuals who are not responding to the noise and would never appear in a generic process.

When that distinction is lost, search becomes transactional. And transactional search rarely works for non-transactional careers.

I want to be clear here, this is not an attack on recruiters starting out, nor a claim that experience alone confers superiority. Everyone learns somewhere. But there is a growing tendency in this industry to claim expertise before it has been earned, and to substitute confidence for competence.

That has consequences.

It places an unnecessary burden on bankers, who are expected to navigate a growing volume of low-quality approaches. It creates friction for HR teams, who must separate genuine insight from activity theatre. And it ultimately makes an already difficult hiring environment harder than it needs to be.

For Relationship Managers reading this, your instinct to disengage is understandable. Your time is valuable, and not every conversation deserves your attention. But the right ones still matter, and they tend to arrive quietly, through people who have taken the time to understand you long before a role exists.

For HR and hiring managers, this is a prompt to look beyond surface-level coverage and question how your talent partners actually operate. Volume is visible. Judgement is not. But only one of them delivers outcomes at the top end of the market.

For recruiters, this is a moment to pause and reflect. If your work relies on volume, speed, and repetition, you are not operating in search, you are operating in sales. There is nothing wrong with that, but the two should not be confused.

At senior levels, careers are not moved by activity. They are moved by trust. Search, when done properly, is quiet. It is intentional. And it is built on relationships that pre-date the role itself.

For bankers, disengagement is not apathy, it is self-preservation. And for hiring leaders, the question is not whether talent exists, but whether your process is capable of reaching it.

And for hiring managers, this is the real challenge. In a market where visibility is easy but access is not, outcomes will depend less on how many partners your HR appoint, and more on who actually has the trust of the people you want to hire in your teams.

The best candidates are not off the market.

They are just waiting for the right conversation, delivered by the right person, at the right time. Reach out to me to discuss in more detail.