It’s difficult to predict what the future of London as a startup capital will be. While this year has seen record investment rush into the British capital from Silicon Valley, Brexit has cast doubts about how long the good times can keep on rolling. And now new figures from Morgan McKinley, the professional-services recruiter, reveal that these uncertainties have taken a significant chunk out of the city’s talent pool.
Having looked at internal data from October, Morgan McKinley found that the number of professional financial job seekers fell by 6% compared to September, making it the slowest month in 2017 and representing a 37% drop from October 2016. At the same time the number of available jobs in the City decreased by 14% between September and October this year, representing a 20% year-on-year tumble.
Commenting on the data, Hakan Enver, operations director at Morgan McKinley, said: “The economic tug of war that Brexit kicked off means we still have no idea quite where we’ll land. Brexit has businesses in a stranglehold. Try as they might to go about things as normal, we do not live in normal times.”
Even though an increasing number of VC investments indicates that investors are still confident in the potential of British startups, it’s still worrying to see that employers more broadly don’t seem to share this optimism. 
