Bear Stearns employees flood Wall Street rivals with resumes

By Paritosh Bansal

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bear Stearns employees are flooding Wall Street with their resumes as the firm is acquired by rival JPMorgan Chase, but the job market looks bad, investment bankers and recruiters said.

On Friday, JPMorgan announced its first top-level management jobs since the banks initially reached their agreement to merge on March 16. Of 26 executives named to executive positions in the investment banking and trading division, only five are from Bear Stearns.

Business line executives will announce the next level of management decisions by mid-April, but many Bear Stearns employees aren't waiting that long.

Options Group, a financial recruitment and consulting firm, started getting resumes from Bear employees "the Sunday the $2 share offer was announced," said Michael Karp, its chief executive. "We started seeing flow in Asia right away. All night we were seeing flow from Europe."

"All investment banks and commercial banks have interviewed people from the investment bank in Bear Stearns," he added.

Options Group is getting about 10 to 15 resumes a day globally even now from Bear Stearns employees, including investment bankers, he said.

JPMorgan by far is the bigger bank, with 180,000 employees worldwide, including 26,000 in investment banking and trading. Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest investment bank before it nearly collapsed last month, has 14,000 in all. Job losses are expected at both.

One banker at a rival firm said resumes have been coming in from not just current Bear employees, but also business school graduates whose offers to join Bear had been rescinded.