• 2025 is expected to be a robust year for mergers and acquisitions, and IPOs.
• Consequently, some investment banks are bulking up on hiring, industry recruiters say.
• Here's a look at which firms are staffing up and what sectors are seeing the most action.

When John Weinberg, the chairman and CEO of the elite boutique investment bank Evercore, sat down for a fireside chat in December at an annual Goldman Sachs conference, he revealed that his firm has been ramping up hiring.

"Most of the time, you don't really do much recruiting in November or December," he told listeners — but this year has been different. "If you could see my schedule, you'd see that virtually every day I am speaking with and recruiting" new talent, he said. "You could probably anticipate that our recruiting efforts will increase, not decrease."

Weinberg isn't the only Wall Street dealmaker for whom recruiting is top of mind. According to industry headhunters, hiring across the Street is expected to gain steam as 2025 gets underway. One headhunter said he's been so flooded with mandates as the end of the year approaches that his pipeline of work is up by as much as 70% over normal levels at this point in the year.

"We're probably up 60% to 70%," Kevin Mahoney, managing partner in the global financial-services practice at Christoph Zeiss Partners, told Business Insider. Next year is going to be "bonkers" in terms of hiring volumes, he said, adding: "We haven't been this busy in a long time."

After several years of lackluster deal activity, Wall Street is finally starting to see signs of a thaw in mergers and public offerings. A cocktail of lower interest rates, pent-up demand, and expectations for a friendlier landscape under Trump has left many dealmakers across the Street feeling bullish about the 2025 prospects for 2025. Robert Stowe, head of Americas equity capital markets at Barclays, told BI that he predicts some $50 billion in IPO volumes in the US next year. That would be a roughly 20% increase from 2024's just over $41 billion worth of IPO volumes in the Americas, as recorded by the deal-tracking firm Dealogic.

BI got an update on the latest investment-banking hiring trends from three top Wall Street headhunters: Mahoney; Meridith Dennes, managing director of recruiting at the firm Prospect Rock; and Brianne Sterling, head of the investment-banking recruiting practice at Selby Jennings.

Dennes said the industry's "musical chairs" will start to spike around January or February after bankers have received their bonuses. Many, she said, have gotten early hints about their bonus numbers this year and are privately grumbling.

"Bonuses are not coming out as strong as we expected them to be, and I think the reason is because there's been so much hiring at the senior level and at the MD level," she explained. "A lot of that compensation pool may be spoken for."

So, with moves on the way, which sectors will see the most activity? Here are a few key trends the headhunters say are worth watching in 2025.

The hot sectors

Banks big and small are already dialing up recruiting for their technology, media, and telecommunications teams, known as TMT in Wall Street parlance.

One reason, Mahoney said, is that those sectors are popular acquisition targets for financial sponsors. Indeed, private-equity firms are itching to deploy the billions they've raised from limited partners, but have been waiting for interest rates to decline.

"Something that I think will be interesting within the tech space, as well, is how teams are looking at staffing and positioning" for AI deals, as well as deals for cryptocurrency and digital-assets companies that may consolidate over the next year, Sterling of Selby Jennings said.

Tech has been a major area for banker movement, said Dennes, who also named healthcare, restructuring, industrials, consumer retail, and financial institutions (FIG) as hot. According to some of the early findings of her firm Prospect Rock's annual compensation survey, bankers in tech and restructuring displayed the highest levels of dissatisfaction with pay.

"Now, if they're not really paid," Dennes said, "they're going to want to jump — and there's opportunity for those folks to jump."

Tech dealmakers on the move

Union Square Advisors, a boutique technology-focused investment bank based in San Francisco, has onboarded a series of dealmakers recently, including tapping managing director Terry Jackson who previously worked at JPMorgan and Bank of America Securities. The firm also hired Todd Meadow to pitch in with sponsor coverage and brought on the banker Chris Appaneal to focus on software for governance, risk, and compliance.

Houlihan Lokey, a midsize firm long respected for its prowess in restructuring and distressed deals, has also been growing its wallet share in tech to win competitive M&A mandates.

This spring, the bank appointed Ryan Lund as co-head of US technology. It's been deepening the granularity of its software coverage with subsequent hires, as well — like Nana Kyei, a managing director who joined from Jefferies this fall and focuses on education tech. Geoff Rhizor joined the tech team in San Francisco in late summer; his coverage, in part, intersects with the fintech group's.

Barclays has also emphasized hiring managing directors focused on tech and healthcare deals, a company spokesperson told BI. Rob Patterson, who serves as head of data and information platforms coverage within tech investment banking, came over from Morgan Stanley. And the bank appointed David King, a former top-level banker at Bank of America, as global head of technology mergers and acquisitions this summer.

Big banks are staffing up

Some banks have already initiated widespread recruiting plans for juniors.

JPMorgan Chase, for instance, was engaged in a vigorous off-cycle recruiting spree for junior investment bankers as deal flow picked up speed this fall, according to industry sources and postings on its job board, as BI previously reported.

Goldman Sachs' careers portal recently displayed roughly a dozen openings for junior bankers in New York, San Francisco, and London. Vacancies included analyst and associate positions in coverage groups like financial institutions, entertainment banking, TMT, and industrials, as well as product-focused functions like equity capital markets.

Bankers need fresh blood: 'Send them our way'

The last time there was an M&A boom during the pandemic, many banks were caught unprepared and understaffed, resulting in complaints from overworked junior bankers.

This time, Wall Street employers say they won't make the same mistake twice — and many are eyeing boosting their junior ranks in preparation, the recruiters said.

Dennes expects an emphasis on associates and mid-level vice presidents to help juggle the ins and outs of executing the manifold deals coming down the pike. "Experienced bankers are always in demand," she said. "Anyone who has closed a couple of deals and is able to train junior staff is very valuable."

Dennes' firm, Prospect Rock, is currently working on filling four analyst roles, six associate roles, and two VP roles, postings on its website showed. Still, she doesn't see 2025 hiring following the same frenetic pattern it did during the pandemic-era M&A boom.

"In 2021, you just needed bodies — more horsepower. This is very different," she said. Now, banks are markedly more vigilant in emphasizing quality over quantity. "Nobody wants a 2021, 2022 redo," she added. "A lot of those hires were not strong."

Some senior dealmakers are already worried about short-staffing. A managing director at a Wall Street bank told BI he was confident that 2025 would deliver a volume of work comparable with 2021 levels, if perhaps not the same soaring valuations.

"Part of the conversation that we're going to have to think through is augmenting the team at the mid-level" to handle execution, he said. In this hiring market, though, "it's almost impossible" to find impressive associates or VPs, he cautioned. "Send them our way — because it's hard."

Are you an investment-banking insider or do you have knowledge of industry moves on Wall Street? Get in touch with these reporters. Reed Alexander can be reached via email at [email protected] or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at 561-247-5758. Emmalyse Brownstein can be reached at [email protected] or via Signal at 305-857-5516.

• JPMorgan tech exec Teresa Heitsenrether talked about the bank's ongoing adoption of generative AI.
• The bank has rolled out its "LLM suite" to 200,000 employees.
• Speaking at the Evident AI Symposium, Heitsenrether explained how it's been taken up and by who.

Before a business review with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Teresa Heitsenrether runs her presentation through one of the bank's generative AI tools to help her pinpoint the message she wants to convey to the top boss.

"I say, what is the message coming out of this? Make it more concise. Make it clear. And it certainly has helped with that," Heitsenrether, who is responsible for executing the bank's generative AI strategy, told a conference in New York on Thursday.

Dimon himself is a "tremendous user," she said, and is waiting for the ability to use the bank's tools on his phone.

"He's been desperate to get it on his phone and so that's a big deliverable before the end of the year, " Heitsenrether added.

JPMorgan, America's largest bank, has now rolled out the LLM Suite, a generative AI assistant, to 200,000 of its employees.

The tools are the first step in adopting AI technology across the firm. Heitsenrether, JPMorgan's chief data and analytics officer, speaking at the Evident AI Symposium, said that the next generation would go beyond helping employees write an email or summarize a document and link the tools with their everyday workflow to help people do their jobs.

"Basically go from the five minutes of efficiency to the five hours of efficiency," she added, saying it will take time to reach that goal.

'The flywheel effect'

The response to the LLM rollout has been "enthusiastic" and has created "healthy competition" between teams, she said. The wealth and asset management arm was the first division to use generative AI, piloting a generative AI "copilot" for its private bank this summer.

"When the investment bank found out they said 'Well, wait a minute, we want to be on there too,'" she said. "It does create a flywheel effect."

JPMorgan offers courses and in-person training for employees to use the firm's generative AI tools, such as how to prompt a chatbot properly, but the bank is also leaning on superusers, or the 10% to 20% of employees who are "really keen" to help with adoption.

"We embed people within different groups to be the local source of expertise to be able to help people that they work with understand how to adopt it," Heitsenrether explained.

The most common superusers seem to be those who clearly see the benefits of generative AI, such as a lawyer who saves hours by getting a synopsis of contracts or regulations instead of reading them all.

Despite Wall Street's interest in generative AI, getting workers to actually adopt the technology has been a key hurdle for finance firms, Accenture Consultant Keri Smith previously told BI. As a result, training and reskilling efforts have come under the spotlight, she said.

Heitsenrether said that they're trying to engage with the "pockets of resistance" now because it will be harder to convert them once the technology becomes intertwined with workflows.

She also said that the sooner people engage with AI, the less skeptical they are, and they see how it can augment, not replace, their jobs.

"Having it in your hands I think demystifies it quite a lot," Heitsenrether said. She used the example of a developer using it to more quickly write a test case. She said if they see the benefits, they realize "this is not something that's going to be done without me, but it's just a way to make my work that much more effective."

What's next: AI assistants

By this time next year, Heitsenrether told the audience that she hopes she'll be talking about "enabling employees with their own assistant" that's specific to them and their jobs.

Some of the legwork needed to develop those more autonomous forms of AI is currently being done in pilots, Sumitra Ganesh, a member of JPMorgan's AI research team, said during another panel.

Even still, the early use cases for AI workers will likely be constrained because these systems still need a human in the loop to ensure the reliability needed in such a regulated industry.

"We don't have a lot of trust right now in these systems," she said. Having an expert in the loop who can verify AI outputs is "kind of babysitting these agents at this point, but hopefully, it's like training wheels — at some point we will be confident enough to let them go," Ganesh said.