With jobs harder to come by, bankers are behaving badly towards recruiters and headhunters, who are suddenly unable to slot them into comfortable new positions.

“We’re starting to get a lot of angry emails,” says one structured credit headhunter. “Bankers are approaching us and questioning why we can’t place them in hedge funds or commodities businesses. They’re venting their spleens, but there just aren’t the jobs.”

“Candidates are more rude and obnoxious,” confirms the head of a derivatives recruitment firm. “We get a lot of emails saying ‘You guys are no good at what you do’.”

“Candidates have become used to getting what they wanted over the past few years,” agrees Adam Buck at recruiters Selby Jennings. “They were able to say, ‘I want to work in a macro hedge fund with £x million under management,’ and we were able to deliver for them. That’s no longer always possible and people need to understand that the market has changed.”

Frustration might also have something to do with the fact that recruiters are no longer doing their best to accommodate everyone.

Zaheer Ibrahim at search firm Kennedy Associates says it just isn’t viable to spend time on borderline candidates any more: “The CVs we see are walking money. We’ll go for the triple and double As, but we can’t waste our time with people who won’t generate money for us in this kind of market.”