[jermaustin1]

In years past, I've seen a plethora of £700-1200/day contracts in London for candidates with only 2 years of experience and no education requirement.

And it has always made me wonder why they were offering such high pay for such low experience, when salaried positions in London are lower than NYC, and most of the contract work I see in NYC are half that rate.

[cosmodisk]

I don't think most of those ads had any sense at all tbh( I used to see a lot of them as wel) and here's why: 99% of these jobs are in financial sector, especially in trading branches). Most of them may only require 2 years or so experience, however the experience they need are in some esoteric products/services one can only learn/access if in this kind of job( i.e. FX trading platforms, interbank settlement software,some random inhouse thing that connects to NASDAQ,etc.) The reality is that for most of those jobs there are only 50-100 people in the city who can do it and they are all employed and they all know it.So any recruiter worth his salt knows most of them by name,as they just keep crossing the road from one bank to another every couple of years. So all these ads do serve is some newly hired recruiter with no contacts, who hopes some random guy from abroad will have the necessary experience and won't understand the market situation.