Opinion: Anglo tapes leave job-hunting former staff reeling

The arrogant, uncaring and reckless attitudes revealed by the testosterone tapes has horrified us all. It’s as if the entire nation has been victimised by the Anglo corner boys.

But one group of victims now stand doubly victimised – former employees of the old Anglo Irish Bank, who are still on the staff of IBRC. Professionals who had nothing to do with the high-risk approach at the top. People who, quite literally never did anything wrong but whose future job prospects have been squarely kicked by the revival of the Anglo horror.

Those former Anglo employees know only too well that guilt-by-association may cripple their chances of getting another job in a sector for which they’re highly qualified and in which they’ve gained solid experience.

Looking at the CVs of several of them over the past year, it’s been evident how sadly desperate they are to hide the Anglo bit of their careers. They major on their academic achievements (usually tremendous – these were the brightest and best of their generation) and they reverse the usual order, so the Anglo section comes at the end and is as brief as possible.

Some of them had begun to hope that the IBRC period, those years between the Anglo collapse and the present, might create a buffer, preventing their career from crashing straight into the Anglo wall.

They had begun to hope that, with Sean FitzPatrick charged and having to pitch up at a Garda station each week to prove his presence in Ireland, prospective employers would pay less attention to the personnel and culture of their previous employer.

'No conscience'
And then came last week and the publication of the tapes. They listened to the tapes online while simultaneously going through the transcripts in the newspaper. They did it again and again and again.

“I think for everybody else, it’s kind of a spectator sport,” one of them said. “It’s kind of like ‘Oh, my God, these guys had no code, no conscience, no sense of values or responsibility, they were macho, they were this, they were that.’

“But for anybody who had been in Anglo but had not in their golden circle, it was like being found guilty – in public – of a crime you had no hand, act or part in.”

That man had a job interview on Monday. The job specifications match his skills and competences point for point. He is, in short, so perfectly qualified for the post that an interview was inevitable and appointment, post-interview, clearly justified.

But from the moment he walked in the door of the financial institution’s boardroom and sat down facing three of its top managers, he knew he was a goner.

“It wasn’t that they were contemptuous. The problem was that they were so polite and considerate and kind. It was so obvious they were just going through the motions. They never even asked me about the tapes. What was I going to do? Bring them up in the middle of the interview in order to say, ‘Look, the rest of us weren’t like that’?”

Unspoken prejudice
That's the real dilemma facing hundreds of competent qualified ethical executives in their 20s, 30s and 40s, whose only crime was getting a good job with the old Anglo.

Equality legislation prevents discrimination on a number of fronts, but nobody ever figured that simply being in a specific company during particular years could create an unspoken prejudice which would so grievously damage a person’s employment prospects.

On the tapes released over the weekend, you can hear David Drumm accusing Merill Lynch of "knifing" them and signing a "death warrant". The hope is that the content of these tapes isn't doing the same to his former employees.

But is there anything they can do?

The one bit of “luck”, if that, is that these tapes have come out at the start of the summer. The jobs market practically closes down for July and August which at least gives them time to plan for September, although that’s a double-edged sword: while the intervening time may take the tapes off the minds of recruiters, it also pushes people currently in IBRC closer to the end of their employment.

Like anyone looking for a new role, the one-time Anglo staff need to stay plugged into their network, not hide away. A large number of filled roles are never actually advertised or given to recruitment agencies. People are hired through “the network” – past colleagues, clients, friends and acquaintances who know how competent and ethical they are and the value they could bring to an organisation.

It was once said of the dancing partners Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that Ginger had to do everything Fred did – except backwards and wearing high heels. It's going to be like that for former Anglo employees.

Tapes question
They will have to tailor their cover emails and CVs for each organisation they're applying to and each role for which they're applying, and prepare for interviews so that when the tapes question surfaces, they know how to handle it, and when the tapes question doesn't surface, they know how to out it – and kill it.

Eoghan Mc Dermott is a director of the Communications Clinic and head of training and careers there. He is author of The Career Doctor. @EoghanMcDermott