Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a project to better understand hiring activity in New York City’s financial sector. What started as an effort to track job openings across major banks has gradually developed into a much larger data collection and research project.

Rather than looking at job openings on a particular day, I wanted to build a historical record of how those openings change over time. Which banks are adding positions? What types of roles are seeing the most activity? What can job postings tell us about compensation, experience requirements, and the skills employers are looking for? These are some of the questions I hope to explore through my NYC Finance Hiring Tracker.

Why Track NYC Finance Hiring?

There is no shortage of headlines about hiring, layoffs, and employment trends in the financial industry. However, those headlines don’t always provide a clear picture of what is happening across individual employers or different areas of finance. Career websites offer a useful starting point, but they primarily show openings available at a particular moment rather than how hiring activity changes over time.

I wanted to see whether collecting this information consistently could provide a more detailed view of the market. By building a historical dataset, I could examine not just how many jobs are advertised, but also how the number and composition of openings evolve across companies, functions, and seniority levels. Whether you’re a finance professional exploring opportunities, a job seeker comparing employers, or someone interested in banking employment trends, I hope the findings will offer a useful perspective on the NYC finance job market.

How the NYC Finance Hiring Tracker Works

The project currently tracks public New York City job postings across 10 major banking institutions: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, and BNY. I’ve developed automated tools that collect postings directly from each employer’s career website and store them in a database. That allows individual positions to be followed across multiple days rather than counted as entirely new observations whenever they appear.

The system preserves historical job descriptions and organizes postings into standardized categories, including finance functions, seniority levels, compensation, experience requirements, educational qualifications, professional credentials, and technical skills. Unlike a typical job listing page, the project is designed to preserve changes over time, making it possible to analyze trends that a one-day snapshot would miss. After a testing and development period in September 2026, October 1 marked the beginning of the formal reporting dataset.

What I Plan to Measure

One of the main objectives is to distinguish between the total number of advertised positions and the activity occurring beneath that number. For example, a bank could have approximately the same number of openings at the beginning and end of a month, even though dozens of positions were added and removed during that period. Tracking these changes should provide a more complete picture of recruitment activity than simply comparing total openings at two points in time.

I’m also interested in the types of opportunities being advertised and the qualifications employers are seeking. This includes comparing openings across investment banking, research, risk management, credit, and other finance functions, as well as examining seniority levels, published base-salary ranges, experience requirements, professional credentials such as the CFA and FRM, and technical skills including Python, SQL, and Excel. I’ve previously explored whether the CFA charter is worth pursuing from a career perspective. This project could eventually provide another perspective by examining how frequently employers mention the designation in their job postings.

What to Expect from Future Reports

My goal is to turn the dataset into a series of recurring reports examining NYC finance hiring activity. I plan to develop shorter weekly summaries and more comprehensive monthly reports, covering changes in job postings, comparisons across employers, and the distribution of opportunities by finance function and seniority level.

As the historical dataset grows, I also hope to explore longer-term trends, including how long positions remain advertised, changes in published compensation, and demand for particular skills and credentials. The initial reports will focus on establishing a reliable baseline and presenting the observations clearly. More detailed analysis should become possible as additional data accumulates.

Understanding the Limitations

An important distinction is that job postings are not the same as actual hires. A newly advertised position does not necessarily result in someone being hired, while a posting that disappears may have been filled, cancelled, or removed for another reason. The project measures observable job-posting activity rather than completed hiring, layoffs, or changes in total employment.

There are also differences in how employers advertise positions, and the initial coverage is limited to 10 major banking institutions rather than the entire NYC financial sector. I’ve developed consistent classification rules and data-quality checks to improve comparability, including safeguards against treating temporary collection issues as genuine job removals. These limitations will be explained in the methodology accompanying the reports.

Looking Ahead

This project has become much more involved than I originally anticipated. Building the collection system was only one part of the process. Organizing thousands of job postings, preserving historical records, and developing meaningful comparisons have required a lot of work behind the scenes. There is still more to do, but I’m looking forward to sharing the results as the project develops.

Ultimately, I hope to create a useful resource for finance professionals, job seekers, and anyone interested in understanding how employment opportunities across New York City’s banking sector are changing. I’ll be sharing updates and reports here on The Turbo Turtle as the project progresses. If there are particular questions about NYC finance hiring that you’d like to see explored, feel free to leave a comment.