FT recruiting, going into senior year

I had done my summer internship at a MM bank in 2022 and successfully lateraled for FT 2023 at an EB. Since the market conditions were pretty bad it was quite tough to re-recruit but you just have to be consistent. As a timeline, my summer internship ended in the first week of August and as soon as I was told that I had the return offer, I immediately started FT recruiting. Basically during the summer internship, I had done all the prep I needed to for interviews, etc and once August started I began to reach out to all the top banks for networking, coffee chats, etc to get on a call and see if they were going to be hiring more FT people. As I said, I reached out to all the top banks BB and EB and luckily I was able to get on call with most of them and make a good first impression. In the end, it was disappointing because almost everyone said that they weren’t hiring anymore and even places where I had networked with 2+ people told me that they couldn’t move ahead because they weren’t adding more FT people. By early September, I finally had interviews lined up with just two EBs and one worked out and I got an offer.

Hopefully this helps. I can’t tell you whether it will be easy or hard for FT 2024 but if you keep at it there will definitely be at least 2-3 top banks with spots open.