Why is Frankfurt not attractive to potential employees?
But most major banks have desks both in Frankfurt and Paris already, not just to handle local business but because it's hard enough getting top people to London (my ex even regularly tells me of her frustrations of dealing with offices in certain countries that exists solely because a single hotshot trader prefers a certain city over one of their big centres and brings in enough business for it to be worth a whole support staff to keep them happy) and so most of these banks needs presences in lots of places to be attractive.
If you don't have a presence in Paris and your competitor does, you're going to lose a sufficient portion of high-value traders to competitors over it for it to be an issue.
Frankfurt is no London and no Paris, this is clear. However, that's also related to the way in which Germany as a whole functions. The individual cities aren't all that big, but they are clustered in metropolitan areas.
If you live in the vicinity of Frankfurt, you can just drive to Heidelberg for a Saturday night out (about an hour). Or, if you're more interested in food, theater or classical music, you have a large selection from Mainz to Aschaffenburg, all of which is easily reachable from Frankfurt.
Equally, the pool of support staff you can draw from isn't recruited from the minuscule population of Frankfurt (700k), but from the whole metro region (5.5 million). I myself live at the outermost boundary of the metro region and know many people who commute to Frankfurt.
The second point is that the relatively small size of the city of Frankfurt is an asset in one critical regard: Frankfurt is first and foremost a banking city (and secondly an airport city). If banks want to exert some influence over policy there, they have all the leverage they could want. This is not the case in Paris.
Personally, I'd be surprised if there was anything other than a somewhat even split of relocations between Frankfurt and Paris. And I'm fairly certain that the TGV service between Frankfurt and Paris will also be extended beyond what exists today.
One big advantage of Frankfurt is that Germans are much more open to speaking English than the French, and this is an advantage that should not be underestimated. If you don't speak German, but do speak English it's possible to live in Frankfurt. To live in Paris, you have to speak French.
Only Amsterdam (which has English as its official language next to Dutch) is better in that regard. In Amsterdam you don't even have to ask if someone speaks English (that's considered an insult, on the same level of asking someone whether they can read and write).
I also have had first hand experience of staff at establishments in Paris simply refusing to speak English. All in all if I had to choose as a Londoner I would prefer to move to Frankfurt or Amsterdam over Paris any day of the week.
I speak French, but not that well. First time I went to Paris ('94) it was indeed close to what you suggest, but my French-teacher was right about one thing: As long as you got the pronunciation right and tried people would fall over themselves to try to help you.
Last times I've been in Paris, on the other hand, people would impatiently interrupt me when I tried to practice my French, and switch to English. It was outright annoying, as it made it hard to improve.
The most inconvenienced I've ever been was in some little village in Provence a couple of decades ago, when a shopkeeper didn't understand my French. But he proceeded to stop random passers-by until he found one that was willing and able to translate.
That's the same everywhere. London is a cluster. My suburb of London itself has about a dozen town centres.
> Frankfurt is first and foremost a banking city (and secondly an airport city)
That's great for employers, awful for employees.
> If you live in the vicinity of Frankfurt, you can just drive to Heidelberg for a Saturday night out (about an hour)
Driving for an hour is not attractive for going out whe working long hours. This is why you see bankers paying millions of pounds for small flats in London Docklands so they are close to both work and nightlife. People who are used to walking distance or a few minutes on the underground to get to work and the same to get to restaurants and nightclubs are not going to be impressed by an hour to get someone interesting.
> Equally, the pool of support staff you can draw from isn't recruited from the minuscule population of Frankfurt (700k), but from the whole metro region (5.5 million).
Nobody cares about the support staff. They're easy to hire and cheap. The banks cares about the traders they pay a million plus in base salary and similar levels in bonuses. If they are willing to move to Frankfurt, the banks will go there. If they say "no, I'll just go to bank Y instead - they have an office in Paris," the banks will go to Paris.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, the bank my ex works for maintains several offices because of individual traders that insist on living in specific places and who bring enough business to justify it.
> If banks want to exert some influence over policy there, they have all the leverage they could want. This is not the case in Paris.
Banks have plenty of leverage in London, which is much larger than both Paris and Frankfurt combined. If anything they will have more leverage in Paris because Frankfurt is real competition for Paris in a way neither Paris or Frankfurt has been for London.
But generally, Frankfurt is perceived very well. Less hostile towards non-French speakers than Paris (subjectively), less remote than Dublin. It's a very small city, but you're quickly in Munich/Berlin/Cologne, which helps.
that's objective, germans generally are more keen to speak with foreigners in english than french, no matter their level
It differs, in generally people either speak it there, and then do so reasonably, or they absolutely don't speak it, not a single word.
This is quite different in The Netherlands. In Amsterdam people in shops etc will often address you in English and are rather fluent, but even in the most remote villages of the Dutch countryside everyone speaks some amount of English. It may be with a very heavy accent and not fluent at all, but generally it's enough to at least have a basic conversation.
If I recall correctly, I believe Faroese might be the closest (depending on how you classify Scots).
One the closest indeed, although Frisian is technically even closer. If I'm not mistaken it's really quite close to old English, but a modern English speaker wouldn't be able to understand it at all ;)
That's important. The French tend to be happy to accommodate, but there's something about making it clear that communication is a mutual effort. If you try in French first, it indicates that you want to work with them rather than assuming that they should kowtow to your preferences.