Financial services businesses are recruiting again – at the fastest rate for 15 years – but are favouring low-paid call centre staff over high-flying accountants.

Research by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Confederation for British Industry has revealed most of the new roles created by banks are for counter staff or call centre employees.

But the good news for recruiters is that 41% of City firms are hiring, while only 5% are still reducing their headcount.

Vanessa Burgin of PwC said this didn’t necessarily mean vacancies were restricted to this area, but that the public face was a priority for firms. “Because of increased competitiveness, they have had to put money into this,” she said.

Finance recruiters, however, say growth is definitely not restricted to customer-facing staff. Stephanie Docherty, a director of Michael Page City, told Recruiter: “The City has gone mad. We are very, very busy. The City is busy taking on professionally-qualified people: the banks are definitely better.”

This has had a knock-on effect for recruiters. “Recruitment agencies are recruiting people to work for them like crazy,” said Docherty.

Richard Milne from Robert Half Finance & Accounting agreed. “The market has increased so much that a lot of the bigger companies are giving us multiple orders: as much as 40 jobs in a go,” he said.

Milne added that the excitement in the financial services sector was thanks to its sensitivity to market trends: “It is the quickest industry sector to be hit by a downturn and the quickest to benefit from an upturn,” he added.