A Rant On Early Recruitment
This isn’t helpful or even constructive, but just a rant. These recruiting timelines are so beyond stupid and schools are so pathetic that they don’t band together and stop these ridiculous early recruiting practices. Just heard from a friend his younger brother is prepping for IB recruitment 18 months in advance of an IB internship without having secured an internship for this coming summer. The kid has literally had 1 internship in his entire life in wealth management and now is trying to do practice LBO’s wtf. Pretty sure he also hasn’t even been in an office once in his entire life due to covid.
I get this has been going on awhile and even when I started in banking the timelines felt early, but it’s absolutely pathetic that target schools don’t band together and set hard lines in the sand for campus recruitment teams of different firms and say they need to wait until a candidates junior year. I didn’t even know about investment banking until an internship my sophomore year, which led me to learning about the industry and eventually breaking it. So much learning and development happens by having a second internship—it allows people to actually explore careers and understand where they fit in the world. Further, this model is just a ridiculous disadvantage toward first-gen college students or just any students whose parents aren’t working at a bank. Even having a parent that is a doctor can make kids completely miss recruitment because these timelines are made by bird brained HR people trying to jump in front of each other.
Again, this isn’t helpful, but I’m sorry to you younger kids that have to go through this. I wouldn’t have broken in with this current timeline and frankly I think your academic institutions are failing you by not setting boundaries like many bschools often do.
lmao what a hardo
you sound lame
Bruh... anyone with half a brain can do this job if they try hard enough. Sure it's harder than your average job out there but it's not like PE or HF. Also I think OP is saying that early recruiting causes lots of additional stress onto kids who are mostly just trying to figure it out. Like dude, do you really expect some freshman that just started college three months ago to know everything about IB or finance? Probably not and the few that do either have parents in the industry or learned about IB through some upper year.
The main problem with early recruiting is it forces kids to decide on their career choice without having considered all the options. So instead of getting all the "best talent", you get a bunch of kids recruiting for these roles simply because their peers are doing it as well. As a result, we end up with summer analysts who either become dissatisfied with their internships or full-time analysts who leave within six months.
This. Early recruiting has benefits in the "talent war" but you leave out a lot of kids who would do well in banking, but don't discover it until their junior year and are already way too late.
The fact that diversity recruiting is even earlier than regular recruiting makes it even harder to find really qualified diverse candidates - they're out there, but they're not doing practice DCFs all of sophomore year. Again, makes sense it's early as desirable diverse candidates go early, you just lose so many potential people by basically shutting the door at the end of sophomore year
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Hardo vibes, but honestly I agree with the idea. The job market has become incredibly competitive, both for firms and for students. Talent is being drawn to other industries like tech/startups, consulting, etc., and firms are also recruiting from across a wider range of schools. Firms benefit by recruiting earlier (EBs tend to get better talent than BBs), and students want to secure good jobs ASAP, so now they have to be prepared to compete in the large pool for the few spots. The days where you could worry about getting a job once you were near graduation are long gone for any industry. Even beyond recruiting. Take a look at college admissions, where you have to be getting top grades and be excelling the second you enter HS (and even before)
I don’t fault firms for trying to recruit early—I fault schools for allowing it. There’s a big difference. My post wasn’t, “why is recruiting early” it’s I feel bad for the schools that don’t have a spine and aren’t looking out for setting students up for success.
A few things here:
1) of course you disagree with the take, you are a 24 year old edge lord posting about trump and BLM on a finance website who maybe just lateraled to an investment bank based on your previous posts. Work for 6 years at large funds and small and let me know if you still have such a edgy take.
2) I’m pretty competitive and have no problem with competition. Before you go dogging my background maybe consider my point on first gen or frankly just students who have other interests out of the gate in college (maybe being a D1 athlete for example). The current system isn’t rewarding those that are smartest, hardest working, or even that want it the most. It rewards those that have heard of banking or are deeply invested in getting a role early in college. It’s not a competition thing and it’s not “markets working as they should” There is a glaring issue where the hopscotching to the front of the line by firms is creating a dogshit equilibrium that harms employers, students, and universities by having students make career decisions without full information. No one is better off and it’s a race to the bottom. I assume you also are the sort of clown that thinks capitalism would work best if there were no laws because “the free market would know best”.
What schools could do is as mentioned create a coalition of target schools and say—you aren’t allowed to interview students until x date. Doing so is in violation of our relationship and advertise to students that employers that hop the established timeline are behaving unethically and in violation of an agreement that they signed with the school. For those that say it would put students at certain schools at a disadvantage, I strongly disagree. If Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, Notre Dame, Michigan, Northwestern, IU, (insert whatever other bullshit target here) all released a joint letter, I banks would fold. Hell, consulting and many other firms don’t play this game of hopscotching bullshit—the incentives just need to be rejiggered. Schools could do it, but they won’t because they just don’t really care and it would be difficult to get agreement/ who wants to be the guy spearheading that task? That said, I stand by the schools are failing their students by allowing such predatory recruiting processes. Also, I’m not saying don’t recruit early even—it’s specific to recruiting prior to the previous internship. It’s really shifting recruiting to 9 months in advance versus 18 months.
I dont see how they could enforce that though, since firms don’t need permission from schools to hire their students. There are already guidelines for OCR, but nowadays the firms that recruit early do their interviews on the phone/virtually and in their office, rather than at the schools.
Schools can't do shit about it. In fact, many have already tried. Take a look at some universities' OCR recruitment policies and you'll see regulations/guidelines regarding the issues you mentioned, such as timelines and exploding offers. In practice, it doesn't really matter because most of these firms do their advertising for info sessions/applications through student organizations using their current analysts as ambassadors for their alma maters. What "hard lines in the sand" do you want schools to make? Punish students in these organizations?
I agree that it's not "fair", but there's no incentive for them to recruit later. In fact, the incentive is for them to recruit earlier. As someone who got an EB offer my sophomore year without ever having done an internship, it was nice to be able to completely enjoy my final 2.5 years of college without having to worry about job recruiting.
Let’s be real over the last 5-10 years schools in the USA have gone the way of other countries and become a recruitment pipeline to tech/finance/consulting jobs.
When an 18 year old comes on here the main thing they ask “hows xyz school recruiting, how many PE analyst programs go there, where did the SA class go..”
Additionally entry level salaries have gone up (yes banking lagged tech till this year for a bit).
So you can blame the firms, you can blame the schools. But reality is you were more the exception vs the vast part of your cohort went to their school to end up in a high paying field. The same cohort who prefers early recruitment cause they just their to get to Wall Street or Palo Alto.
^ This.
My observation: When I was recruiting out of undergrad (late 2000s at a target school), internships were a 'nice to have' at most places I looked at. Most classmates didn't even think of internships until the summer before Junior year at the earliest. Today? That mentality at firms--and of students--is a dinosaur. When I was recruiting out of my MBA (the mid-2010s), I was thinking about internships on Day 1 of the program (e.g., connecting with alumni in the industry, talking with the career center on placements, networking my face-off). Asking questions about a school's placement/salaries after graduation was once taboo and is now a given. To OP's point, MBA programs typically are a bit better at setting boundaries.
I tend to agree with OP that this elongated/early timeline is unfortunate for current students. I do, however, want to address a couple things.
1) Target Schools Banding Together: It's an interesting thought, but a) how would they plan and execute this in practice? And b) which school would be first through the wall? Additionally, target schools' career centers sometimes value their relationships with hiring firms more than a student and certainly more than that student's desire to be in finance. Thus--IMO--the firms have the power in the relationship. Want to shut me [the firm] out? No problem, I'll go elsewhere. And I'll remember this conversation during next year's recruitment cycle.
2) 1st-Gen / Non-Banking Parents: To be fair, this is a valid point; a) I would argue most college students have an idea of what they want to do (e.g., have been hardworking all their lives, want to be successful), but have a limited view on options (e.g., hear banking is lucrative, hear tech is lucrative), but have no idea what it means to be in the field (e.g., you mean the calculus I learned isn't used in banking?, what do you mean all I need to know how to do is left/right/inner join in SQL for this tech job?); b) Really good callout by OP re: learning/development & exploring careers. Part of an internship is learning what you don't want to do. Which--IMO--is more important than figuring out what you want to do. c) With this said, I would argue 'x'th-gen / banking parents students still don't fully understand why they want to go into finance. They just hear big salary/bonus #s, exit opportunities, etc. Just scrape this forum for the myriad of threads dedicated to 'I'm a 1st yr analyst at BB/EB and want to resign' or 'PE Associate here to tell you PE is banking 2.0'. Until you're really in it--and note that firms tend to treat interns nicely because they want you to be their workhorse later on--you don't know what you're walking into. Unfortunately, the only way to find out is by trial.
To end on a more positive note, whether you get into banking or not there are millions of ways to make millions of dollars/meet your definition of success. Banking--especially on WSO--is the most commonly referenced, but as long as you leverage your knowledge, network (this is--at the end of the day--a very relationship-driven business at the higher levels), and continue trying (also a numbers game), you'll get there. Don't believe me? Look up the threads of people that went to non-targets, those that were homeless, those that switched to banking in their late 30s, etc. that found success/got into banking.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
My observation from even back when I was an analyst and was part of my bank’s recruiting team is we had different timelines for schools. Schools that we commonly recruited from were early and had more established pipelines because we highly valued the students coming from that channel. While some on this thread are saying firms would just say, “oh, you all recruit late we will just go to another school” I don’t think that’s true for target schools, the students coming from those channels are just too highly valued. If Wharton lead the initiative and got a few other similar prestiged schools, investment banks wouldn’t just say, “fine we won’t hire from wharton, or we will skip getting Ivy League/ top 10 grads”, they would accommodate the new timeline.
I agree it sadly is unfeasible because there just isn’t much incentive for schools to really care and no one is going to spend time leading that initiative and building the coalition. Regarding enforcement, it’s not something that needs to be enforced, I think it’s an educational thing. If it was advertised and clearly known by firms and undergrads that there was a specific timeline they were supposed to follow, the firm would get painted in an unethical light if they jumped it which would harm their rep at the institution.
For example, imagine wharton forced schools to sign an on-campus agreement that they would hold off on recruiting efforts until the fall, and career services sent an email to the student body saying, “if you receive emails about recruiting prior to august 15th, please inform career services and be aware this is in direct violation of our agreement with employers. At Upenn we believe significant career development happens in college and in order to allow better career decision making, we hold off on recruitment until august 15th.”
Then if UBS started recruiting kids before the 15th, they would look stupid/ like they aren’t ethical and are bottom feeders. The key is somehow making early recruitment be viewed as negative and predatory (which it is) rather than accepted and standard.
Again, it’s prob not helpful and theoretical, but if someone was motivated I do think schools could push the timeline. Also, as the above poster mentioned, it hopefully would lead to less of people quitting 6 months in because they didn’t really know what they signed up for and feel like they go pushed into a career without much research.
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