Guys, We Finally Made It
Not sure if anyone posted this yet but I noticed this article today on the front page of Yahoo Finance and I started laughing my ass off once I realized they were quoting a bunch of WSO'ers... here's the article, congrats to everyone who pitched in and trolled the whole world now.
Here's the link: Want a Job on Wall Street? 'Let Me Sleep With Your Girlfriend', followed by the article:
Want This Job? 'Let Me Sleep With Your Girlfriend'
By Cindy Perman | CNBC – 29 minutes ago.. .@cnbc on Twitter..Wall Street is rude, it's crude and it will eat you alive. So interviewing for a job on Wall Street is no different.
It's not a meet-and-greet tell-me-about this job or that experience. It's more like a punch in the face. They'll ask you hard questions, maybe inappropriate questions - all to see if you're going to be able to run with the big dogs - or if you need to get your behind back on the porch.
"They're looking for how you handle pressure. How you think on your feet. Are you the brightest of the bright? Are you a natural leader?" said Jeanne Branthover, head of global financial services at Boyden Global Executive Search.
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Wall Street Oasis, a job-search site for financial careers, recently pinged readers for the hardest questions they were ever asked on an interview for Wall Street. The answers included such zingers as:
•"You're going to be working 110 hours a week here. Can you even handle that?"
•Why don't you have any offers yet? What's wrong with you?"
•"What single word would you use to describe yourself so I don't walk out of here and forget you?" (Good answer: Unforgettable!)
•"What line on your resume is the most bull****?"
•"Do you view this as your dream career?" If you answer yes, "If in two years, you receive an offer for more money on the buyside, will you turn it down because this is your dream career?"
•In an interview for a Goldman Sachs (GS) analyst position, the interviewer asked: "If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?"
•"What's your outlook for cucumber prices over the course of 2012?"
•In an interview where there were two interviewers, the one who was supposed to be the silent No. 2 asked just one question: "Are you trying to f*** us over?" The kid froze, the interviewer wrote in a comment on WallStreetOasis.com. The No. 1 interviewer jumped in: "Why didn't you just say no?!"
•"If I told you that the only way you were going to get this job is if you let me sleep with your girlfriend, would you accept?"When it comes to analytical questions like "What's your outlook for cucumber prices?" or "How many tennis balls could you fit in this room?," it's not about the answer.
"It doesn't mean you have the right answer - they're trying to see how your thought process works," Branthover said.
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The kiss-of-death answer to any of these questions is "I don't know."
"You answer 'I don't know' and that will get you out the door!" Branthover said.
Some of the other questions she said her clients have been asked include:
•If you could choose, what brand would you like to be and why?
•How many balls would it take to fill Central Park?
•Have you ever cheated on your partner?
•Did you ever tell a secret you promised to keep?
•What is the biggest lie you've told - to whom and why?
•Tell me, how would you go about killing a crocodile?Questions for Wall Street jobs have always been tougher than those for most jobs, Branthover said, but they've gotten even tougher since the financial crisis.
"They want to know if you can really be a leader in tough times," Branthover said. A lot of these leaders hadn't been tested on that before the financial crisis. They survived and now they want to know - can you?
So, they may ask you questions like "What was one of the toughest decisions you had to make?" or "What was the hardest environment you've ever worked in?" Then, they'll want to know what you did to solve the problem, get through the tough situation - and what you might do differently today.
Plus, with all the layoffs on Wall Street, there are fewer people to do all the work, meaning they really want the best of the best, the brightest of the bright.
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When it comes to the inappropriate questions like sleeping with your girlfriend and cheating on your partner - the kind that would get the red light flashing in human resources at most companies - it's about seeing if you can handle how brutal Wall Street can be.
"They're trying to divide the men from the boys and the girls from the women," Branthover said. "If you have soft skin, you're not cut out for investment banking."
They're going to poke you with a stick and see how you react.
"They want to see that you're not rattled by rudeness; that you stay on your feet and don't look shocked," Branthover said.
You don't have to answer "Yes, you can sleep with my girlfriend" - you just have to not look shocked and have a quick comeback.
A good answer one person posted on Wall Street Oasis was: I've been with my girlfriend a long time and plan to marry her. If you so much as kiss her neck, I'd [bleeping] knock you out. That being said, I have a beautiful sister I'd be happy to hook you up with ...
And that, my friend, is a lesson in how deals get done on Wall Street!
Mod Note (Andy): Throwback Thursday - this originally went up 7/19/12
BH, why did you copy past the article when you already posted the link???
Look at some of the comments left by people:
''TAX THEM TO DEATH''
''A GOOD Broker.....IS A DEAD ONE.... ROTTING UNDER 6 FEET OF FRESH CONCRETE.....''
''All of these are good reasons to never trust anyone on Wall Street''
Yahoo comments are fucking amazing.
Nice. I also found a Bloomberg Businessweek article that quoted WSO about sleeping at the office. If anyone's interested let me know.
Ooooh I am! Link/title please?
Here you go brah: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/sleeping-on-the-job-goo…
Beautiful.
As they say in banking:
Thx to the team for all your hard work.
Sent from my Blackberry device
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Anyone else think we should send her a cordial invitation to do a real interview with us?
Patrick you should make this happen haha... we'll show her how it really goes down around here
Invite her to the conference.
No, offer her a conference exclusive.
She has agreed to cover the WSO Conference and will be in attendance :-) -- be careful what you wish for.
Haha yes.
Yahoo comments give me AIDS
This is hilarious. Yet it makes me sad how little the average individual knows about what is really going on that causes them to get this angry.
People fear what they don't know
Those comments are pure gold :D.
hey cnbc if your reading this
i love you meridith
Forwarded to my entire group. Everyone is still laughing.
FWIW, everyone at my old fund knows I'm BlackHat now thanks to that "are you trying to f*** me" line. Thank them for finding this article in the first place, hahaha...
hahaha +1sb
what thread they pull this from ?
Let me guess, these are the same people who are shocked that soldiers kill people, that dogs bark, and that politicians lie? Oh mercy, the horror of it all.
paaaleeeze, whatevs
hahahaha these commets are just too good:
"It's easy to get a real job creating real value. It's tough to get a job as a vampire parasite at a vampire squid company that must invade, kill, steal, and lie for loot. New York City is a giant money sucking vacuum pump sucking real value out of the world. It's an evil place to work but evil does pay more then goodness in dollars. NYC is greedy egotistical people who want to take over the world. Still there are good people there too. Good luck to them."
...idiots
Brings the only saying to mind, "if you ask 10 people what they think of bankers, 11 will tell you they hate them."
10 of those 11 will probably think that they work at your local Chase branch.
I agree whole heartedly with the author, bankers and financiers are awful, terrible, crude sub humans who eat souls etc. That said, excuse me as I get back to this excel file Im working on.
Oh, and Maria Bartiromo, if youre watching this I love you.
This is too funny...i gotta stop reading these yahoo comments in the office
Saw CNBC quote Wall Street Oasis word by word and didn't give credit today. Same did the journalist, she said she only spoke with recruiters, traders and bankers, what a liar.
You're like the 3rd person to say something about this but I didn't see it... does anyone have a link or maybe just a decent re-hashing of what they said?!
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000105063
Plus some random quotes all through lunch.
Wow.... they totally lifted everything off this site. SUE SUE SUE
Not only is it sad that they're not giving credit, it's even worse that they're using online message boards for their reporting while acting like they're getting it from legit sources.
Ya I saw that on CNBC. Holy shit, I just lost a ton of respect for them. They took credit for reporting something they didn't even come close to doing. That reporter should be banned from tv.
Write an email, I did. Probably not gonna do anything, but hell...
I was watching this today and laughed my ass off when I realized they jacked some quotes from WSO. They took their information from an online message board with anonymous posters that could literally be anyone in the world. Hell, I could've posted in that thread if I had come up with something clever, and I could have said that it was from an interview that I had at Goldman Sachs. It's pretty pathetic that a major news network would steal from a site like WSO in the first place, and even more pathetic that the reported responsible then lies about the source. Definitely a reminder to be a huge sceptic about everything that you hear on the news.
On the other hand, it's very cool that WSO was referenced in the article that Black Hat linked to. Good publicity for the website.
Look ma, I'm on TV!!!!
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