What effects have sites like M&I and WSO had on IB/finance recruiting? Do you feel as if every single kid you come across who used to want to go to law school, every friend majoring in finance and their cousin are now interested in IB due to how much its been hyped up by the internet? Over the past 20 years, there has been a huge shift of talent into finance - there is no doubting this - but do you feel as if this mass exposure of the industry will leave us with more and more boutique Investment bankers and less and less entrepreneurs in manufacturing, energy, and technology that overall compensation for years to come will continue to stagnate and eventually decline? Have you had to compete with more kids from your schools for IB positions and have you had to take greater sacrifices such as interning earlier and networking more than was required in the pre linkedin, facebook, twitter world?
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Very good question. I graduated a long time ago, so I'm curious to see the responses. It seems to me that the prospects are much worse now, but many more people are interested in joining Wall Street compared to the late 1990's.
I have definitely noticed a marked increase in preparedness for interviews, impressiveness of past experience, and clear understanding of the industry over the past couple of years than I felt my peers and I exhibited when I was in school. I do a fair amount of work with recruiting for my firm for both full time analysts and summer analysts, and recently I have conducted several interviews for core and non-core school teams and have noticed that first round candidates are unbelievably technically sound and that is a great thing when banks are in a recruiters' market. It can be a bummer sometimes when you go and meet with students and you have preset quotas where maybe you can only hire or give super days to a couple of kids and you feel strongly that possibly 3 times that number could navigate the super day and succeed on the job. Kids with great GPAs, previous finance experience, leadership in extracurricular activities, but more importantly who know finance cold. Who can speak intelligently about investment theses for stock picks, who can explain not only the methodology for valuation structures like DCF, LBO and Acc / Dil, but understand the drivers of value, why certain targets would or would not make good prospects for a buyer, etc... and all this in a first round interview... plus they are down to earth and you could see them fitting in well with a team.
I think M&I and WSO have really changed the game from this regard because you have a situation where before... maybe pre-crash, there just wasn't as much readily available info for kids who weren't at targets or who didn't directly have connections to people in banking. That was the primary information source for interview preparation and for cultivating an understanding for the industry. Now we have a situation where, on WSO, we see kids who are juniors in high school who have taken the SAT, scored in the 95%+ percentile, and are trying to determine how they can do an unpaid internship in banking at a boutique in the summer BEFORE college so that they can get a Goldman SA position as a sophomore, work in BX M&A the summer after, and then go straight to the buyside after university. We didn't really see that before the explosion of information initiated largely through WSO, M&I, and sites like Macabacus and ibankingfaq... I think this is a good thing for banks and other firms looking for top talent, but we have also realized a difficult paradigm where kids aren't getting the time in college they need for lower learning... making mistakes, drinking, partying with friends, and exploring other career possibilities. Because the talent pool is so rich and the progression is rapidly accelerating, the benchmark for qualified candidates continues to be raised.
I am routinely amazed going to some of these non core schools and finding kids who are 10x more prepared than kids from targets but we can only take 2 of them out of 100 resumes we collect, yet we will take 10 on campus from targets. I think this model is going to steadily change over time (personal hypothesis based on what I have seen in recruiting) and hopefully it will get to a point where we are having more well rounded analyst classes where everyone who gets an offer is a rockstar, and the percentage of hires due to nepotism or pedigree without the preparation are minimized. To be clear, there are still loads of qualified target kids who are in it to win it and really impress me, but the run of the mill 3.4 from a target who studied econ but can't walk me thru a DCF is starting to lose it's luster. WSO and M&I have played a big part in this transformation...
I'm also interested in hearing people's responses. The competition to get a job on wall street is life/death cutthroat at non targets - anything less than a 3.8 is basically an automatic ding. At the same time though, tons of kids are joining small firms - i.e. see lumina investments from UNC Wilmington - and so rather than the old standard 25% of HYP grads going into finance it almost feels like 20% of ALL college graduates are going into finance in some form whether pwm, asset management or ibd. Now this is good for entrepreneurs and small businesses who will be able to get a cheaper capital transaction fee, but at the same time with so many banks now - even large companies might be more prone to doing business with regional, well known MM's as opposed to BB's which could normalize wages back to how they were in the 1960's and 1970's (when markets were more tightly regulated as well)
Lumina Investments is a joke tho... can't give that much credibility... the investment fund at my alma mater has nearly 5x their assets, is managed solely by students, and has a structured interview process to become a fund manager and consistently beats its S&P benchmark... kids in this fund make Lumina Investments look as close to a serious hedge fund as Lindsay Lohan to a serious actress...
Reviewing resumes tonight and the number using the M&I template or something very similar (basically built off M&I and personalized stylistically) is truly astounding. I'm glad for that as it makes my job much much easier.
It's a nice template, so there is nothing wrong with that, right?
Nothing wrong with it at all. If you weren't going to get in on your merits, having a different layout isn't going to make that happen.
Don't think this site has totally caught on for prospective real estate people yet, which is good for me. But yeah, sites like WSO and M&I + the interview guides make prospective ibankers more well-prepared that they would be without it...I'm guessing the bar for technicals in IBD is much higher than it used to be 10-15 years ago, you just have to know more to keep up
Luckily for me, it hasn't caught on that much in Europe. And truly I feel like it gives me an edge.
Fun fact: I had an IB exam for my MSF, which was basically about the entire structure of IB and the processes of IPO's, M&A and all the other activities in IB. I hardly studied and still got the top grade because of how much I had learned from M&I and in particular WSO.
It's crazy how helpful WSO is and has been in all aspects of my involvement in finance. Knowledge is power, and WSO provides that knowledge in a fun interactive way. (was more fun when swagon was here).
That's the reason I wanted to give back by being an intern for WSO.
student debt was not as bad 20-30 years ago, today's funds are spent paying that shit down, leaving less capital for true entrepreneurial pursuits. and i'm not talking about the facebook and google behemoths, i'm talking about the bumblefuck company no one's heard of outside a certain radius but gets bought for single digit to high millions that some dude in their 20s who didn't go to college founded.
culture lacking in originality - check out the latest entertainment...all rehashes. why change something when the same paths have led to the same results? monkeys unwilling to use an extra ounce of brainpower to do something different, because society doesn't require them to.
it's a formula man. no one gives a rat's ass as long as they see $. $ talks. least path of resistance. what's interesting is that the more technology is introduced, the shittier things get.
Sent from an iPhone.....lol
It'll help you find the girl at the bar with the clap. Compatibility!
rufiolove coming through with the heat. Great posts; agreed on all fronts.
Before WSO, I was content with a decent salary doing whatever in finance. This site has brought out the best in me, but also the worst.
While I agree with the notion that these sites are making some information more readily available than it was in the past, I think many of you are overstating the effect that the sites have. I think the biggest effect is simply an increase in population and an increase in people applying to finance.
Years ago there were people who knew their information cold (the information that was expected back then), just like you have applicants who know the information cold now (except the information itself has changed).
Every year technology and the industry evolves, thereby increasing the possible knowledge for people to have of finance. Therefore, if you were applying years ago, you could have been a top applicant while knowing a much smaller portion of information than the applicants know now (simply because less information was available and there was less competition and a smaller population).
As the amount of applicants increase and the increasing amount of acceptances don't keep up at the same rate, you simply have more of the top applicants to fill up the spots. You still have a large percent of applicants who know little and have never been to WSO or similar resources, but you simply don't see them because an increased population means you have more top notch people to fill up your spots before you even need to consider the other individuals.
**SIMPLE DIRECT SUMMARY OF WHAT I AM TRYING TO SAY ABOVE: -->WSO, M&I, and etc. help, but they are simply built into the progress of technology and knowledge that consistently happens. What really has changed is the number of people that are living and that are applying to finance (while the industry and job market in general can't keep up with offered opportunities and spots).
Computers, internet, search engines, databases full of information are relatively new, and have exponentially increased over time, so of course people will know relatively more now than they did before.
Plus, you have applicants of ranging INITIAL perceived ability that get in through networking, thereby further decreasing the # of spots you have to consider all those applying; once again, minimizing the # of applicants you actually get to see.
Rufio,
Great description. I can definitely say that I didn't know much of anything when I started and I don't think many of my peers did either.
I used to think SUNY Binghamton was a target before I found WSO.
Getting involved with WSO made me go after elite positions out of college that pay $100,000 plus. I came up short, but coming up short meant landing a good job at a great bank making a little less. Without setting that initial goal of getting the job that pays six figures, I would have been content with a lesser position paying $50,000.
I was an under-achiever. Sites like this inspired me to step up my work ethic, eventually landing a job that pays a significantly more than a job I would have been happy with previous to reading WSO.
The point: I know there are thousands of guys and gals like me out there who will go through the same thing. Just this little experience of mine proves that sites like WSO have really increased the number of people stepping it up and gunning for these jobs we all want.
I used to think a $50-60k salary was killing it.
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