“It was the 500-year flood,” he said.

Steven Bridges, executive director of legislative and regulatory affairs for the Community Bankers Association of Georgia, said he isn’t surprised by a desire to retain certain qualified personnel from failed institutions.

“There’s an awful lot of good talent in some of these banks that failed,” Bridges said. “Just because a bank failed doesn’t mean every person working in that bank was bad.”

Two former community bank CEOs, both retired for several years, have been retained as top liquidators of assets for one FDIC contractor, Bridges said.

“They’re definitely scrambling for talent because it’s in short supply, and some of the most ready supply of talent is in some of those failed banks,” Bridges said.

What isn’t clear is if contractors or the FDIC are hiring former employees that could face claims for negligence in a bank failure, said Mark Kanaly, the lead attorney for the banking practice of Alston & Bird LLC.

Kanaly said he knows of at least a dozen or more cases where the federal government issued claim letters against former officers and directors of failed banks. Kanaly said a question that hasn’t been answered is if future claims could be filed.

“In an environment like this, when it’s raining failing banks, the only people holding the umbrella are the folks from the other failing banks,” Kanaly said.

In the cases he is aware of, Schwartz said, potentially culpable parties aren’t being hired.

“They’re not taking the CEOs of these banks unless they were the turnaround specialists, they’re bringing in the second-tier management they are confident didn’t cause the problem,” Schwartz said.

Turning to the private sector to help with bank failures is nothing new.

During the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s, the federal government created the Resolution Trust Corp., an entity charged with liquidating impaired assets and foreclosed properties.

The FDIC currently uses First Financial Network Inc. and DebtX to auction off the assets of many failed banks.

According to a mid-level officer of one failed Georgia bank, employees with value—loan officers, asset managers, and administrators—were kept to help sort out problems and released as projects ended.

Employees associated with this particular bank’s troubles were not invited to stay, the officer said.

The mid-level officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, equated the winding down of the bank to a job interview or scouting process. The officer said several employees of the bank left to find work with other workout firms contracted by the FDIC. Some went on to work with Mir Mitchell & Co. to sort out Silverton Bank when it went into FDIC receivership.

Others applied for contract positions in the FDIC’s new regional office in Jacksonville, Florida.

For each branch seized, one or two FDIC regulators are stationed to help transition to the acquiring bank or begin the liquidation process if no acquirer is found, Kanaly said. For a 350-branch bank like Montgomery, Alabama-based Colonial BancGroup Inc., that’s a tremendous strain on manpower.

The gap for manpower is huge, but Schwartz said the people who have lived through a failure are perfect to help sort out the problems.

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J. Scott Trubey is a staff writer for the Atlanta Business Chronicle.