Hey Monkeys,
So I go to a pretty big target school in the midwest for B4 accounting firms, and currently have public accounting as my backup plan if IB doesn’t work out.
I’m in beta alpha psi, which for those who aren’t familiar is a professional accounting organization. Anyways, last week we had a meeting with representatives from EY, and to my surprise they sent three partners, and four mid-level accountants to meet with about 30 undergraduates on a Thursday night!
In the networking social after, I spoke with all three partners for over five minutes each, and one invited me to their Minneapolis location for a private office tour and lunch. The other two added me on LinkedIn and said we should keep in touch.
I’m curious to those that go/went to an IB target school (or anyone with IB recruiting experience) is this kind of courtship at all found in IB recruiting? If not, what is the extent of courtship for IB recruiting?
Did anyone else open this thread expecting another "should I date my coworker?" question?
CreditMunich, in IB, recruiting is usually broken up into teams with an MD or two leading them. Almost always, these teams are made up of alumni who will go from school to school for OCR events. Whether or not an MD goes depends entirely on his/her schedule and how passionate he/she is about his/her alma mater. I went to a non-target, but was put on a recruiting team for a local college. Another analyst and I went to that school's career fair and then two directors went to conduct on-campus interviews.
Recruiting is very different for accounting and IB. There are probably other reasons, but off the top of my head, if you take the low pay relative to high amount of hours worked in Big Four accounting together with the smaller candidate pool (relative to IB), you have a scenario that requires more "courtship" than IB does.
Updated the title to hopefully convey my meaning better. So essentially IB even at target schools has the mentality of "you need us more than we need you"? Or do you think it just comes down to the fact that no one has time for things like that in IB?
It just depends on the bank.
You have to understand how the business model of the Big Four (at least for accounting) differs from the business model of IBs as it relates to winning business. When my firm needs a service from one of the Big Four, we call a partner and ask for a quote- that's it. When we need a service from an IB, we have several IBs pitch us. The reason for this is the (massive) difference in fees for a Big Four service (quality of earnings, cross-border M&A tax analysis, etc.) versus that of an IB (capital raise, buyside advisory, etc.). This results in MDs and other senior bankers traveling a lot more than Big Four partners (again, at least for accounting), and therefore fewer IB MDs available for OCR activities than Big Four partners.
EDIT: I personally think this benefits candidates. MDs and partners have a lot of advice to offer, but when it comes down to deciding which firm to work for, I feel like I was always able to get a better sense of the day-to-day from junior employees.
B4 tends to have aggressive recruiting tactics, they essentially target sophomores for their externships which usually converts to a junior internship, which more likely than not leads to a FT offer. I was shocked to see the number of sophomore candidates from my school have to choose between tax/audit without having taken a majority of the intermediate level accounting classes.
Not surprised to see the heightened courtship from B4. They tend to preach culture and partner access but as Sil mentioned, the juniors tend to have the better insights. This was my mistake when I went through B4 TAS recruiting. I listened to the partners and senior members more so than the juniors and was miserable that summer. Understand that the seniors are going to have much more bias than junior staff
Big 4 are more aggressive than BB and MBB but it's clear that the partners really liked you. However, if IB is your goal then don't be fooled by their kindness. I would use them as leverage, so if BB doesn't work out maybe you can sneak your way into one of the more financy type of roles in Big 4- Valuations, TAS, corporate finance, or even consulting (M&A, restructuring, etc.).
This is kind of my thought, keep TAS as a possibility in case I can't get into IB right away. Thanks for the response
IB recruiting is a much different game.. MDs at bb ib's are less impressed with Linkedins and mixers than they are the recruitee’s ability to dance and decorate. During courtship, potential recruits will build nuptial bowers – which look a bit like towers of sticks – and decorate them with exclusively blue objects. The recruits will fight, scrap, steal and destroy each other’s structures. They will steal anything blue, and it doesn’t have to be natural, it can be ribbon or plastic, and then the MDs will go around and inspect them.
If the MD approves of the blue creations, the recruit then has to dance for them. During some experiments, researchers have placed red objects on the bowers and found that MDs choose smarter recruits, the ones most able to remove red items.
http://i.imgur.com/tCYBGVR.gif
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