What I Learned While Recruiting

I have recently gone through recruiting for summer internships and after a rocky start and many slight depressions, I finally was able to land an internship with a top tier private bank.

My condensed background:
- Junior
- Top-ten public b-school
- 3.71 GPA
- Recently internally-transferred to business from pre-med track

I learned a lot throughout the process and the following is my attempt at being a wise old sage at the age of 21.

DON'T EXPECT ANY FEEDBACK
I applied for a huge number of internships starting in late November with IB recruitment. Out of all the places I applied, I received feedback of any kind from 22% of the applications, with the vast majority being automated messages sent from a NOREPLY address. The percentage of human feedback in the first stage was in the low single digits.

My dad was shocked to hear these stats, stating that "back in the day" it was unheard of to not receive feedback of any kind regarding applications, let alone 78% of the firms.

What's more unsettling is that one time I interviewed with a firm, sent a post-interview follow-up email followed by weekly emails for four weeks, not receiving a single response.

Bottom line: Don't hold your breath

DON'T OVERESTIMATE YOURSELF
Going into IB recruitment I thought I had it nailed. My resume contained 4 leadership positions, a fall "internship" with a large sports brand, two summers of unrelated work and five awards. In addition I had completed > 300 hours of community service, I had gone to most of the networking sessions, had been to many informational interviews with friends and alums in the industry, and at the time I had a 3.67 GPA.

I applied to pretty much all the banks that were interviewing at my school and received 0 interviews.

I came into the b-school thinking I had it made, that getting in was the competitive part. I thought that I could basically slide by and the recruiters would still be lining up at the door for me. I was wrong: Getting in was the easy part, the competition started as soon as I was admitted. In a school where everyone has "badass" resumes, I was just an average joe. You gotta grind to shine.

Bottom line: Rejection is humbling

DON'T UNDERESTIMATE YOURSELF
I came into the business school with not much knowledge of what I wanted to do. I joined an investment organization in order to gain some knowledge and during the first meeting, they were talking about EBITDA, WACC, DCF, Terminal Values, CAGR - all things that were extremely foreign to me. I was sitting in a room of people who had seemingly known that this is what they wanted to do their whole life, people who had already signed offers with GS, CS, MS, JPM and were killing it. I felt small.

The problem with this is that I was underestimating myself. I was comparing myself to them when I had little in common with them except for the fact that I was in the same school and was the same age. Everything else was different. I believe that we are a sum of our past experiences, and my past experience in business had been a few weeks long while those to whom I was comparing myself had, most likely, been gunning for GS, CS, MS, JPM from the start.

Bottom line: Don't compare yourself to others

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON
My mom always said that things happen for a reason. I always just nodded and agreed, but looking back upon my experiences during recruiting, I can finally wholeheartedly agree.

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and it really changed the way I looked at success. In a nutshell he states that we are functions of our environments and that our environment (i.e. where we grew up, where we went to school, etc.) is all essentially based on luck.

My environment provided me with an opportunity to attend a top tier university. My environment convinced me to switch to the business school. My environment closed the door on investment banking internships. The interviewer from that one firm didn't email me back. There was technicality which excluded me from an internship which I was sure to get. A few days later I was selected for an interview with a firm I thought I had no chance with. I killed the interview and accepted the offer.

Bottom line: Mom is always right

What did you take away from your recruiting experience?