My FT Recruiting Process
I've been seeing a lot of posts about FT recruiting and networking, so I decided to share my FT recruiting experiences and offer some advice on the process.
Background:
Non-Target school
SA at a MM firm
Incoming 1st year at GS/MS/JPM
My Experience:
Coming from a non-target school, I had to network all throughout my junior fall in order to get an internship. I made connections at every major bank after months of emails, phone calls, and trips to New York.
In my spring semester, I started receiving invitations to interview with a few firms. My first superday happened to be with a MM firm, and I was fortunate enough to get the offer. At the time, I had also been invited to a few superdays at several BBs and couple of EBs. Unfortunately, however, I was only given a week to accept my offer. I called up all of the firms who had invited me for superdays, but that one week wasn't enough time for them to interview me. If I had been given more time, some of the firms did say they could have placed me into one of their earlier superdays.
At this point, I was just happy that I had something figured out for the summer. For me, the risk of not having any banking offer was too high, so I went ahead and accepted the MM offer.
I then made sure to reach out to all of my contacts at the other firms and explain to them that I didn't want to take the risk. Everyone was very understanding about my situation, and I let each one of them know that I would reach out to them again if I was interested in full time recruiting.
For the remainder of the semester, I just relaxed and enjoyed the fact that I had an internship in investment banking. I considered networking more, in order to better prepare myself for full time recruiting, but I had already built up a strong network of people who would go to bat for me. Also, I didn't really have a good reason for wanting to leave the MM firm, yet. I hadn't started working, so I didn't know the culture, what kind of work I'd be doing, how busy I'd be, etc. Picking up the phone and telling someone I wanted to go through FT recruiting before even starting the SA experience would suggest that all I cared about was rankings/prestige/exit opps or some other, in my opinion, bad reason.
I've seen a lot of people on this site ask about when they should start networking for FT recruiting and my advice is this: if you can come up with a compelling reason as to why you want to switch banks, then it's never too early to start networking. Most people will tell you to reach back out to them later in the summer, when they can ask you about what all you've learned and, more importantly, when they have a better understanding of their hiring needs. Nonetheless, making any kinds of connections, especially when you may not have any, is important.
For me, I didn't reach out to any of my contacts until a week or two into my internship, after I had settled in and began working on real projects. I grabbed coffee and spoke on the phone with my contacts all throughout the summer, and almost every conversation started with the same two questions:
1. What kinds and how many projects/deals are you working on?
2. Do you think you'll get an offer?
They wanted to know if I was an intern who was just sitting around and getting by, or if I was genuinely developing skills and learning about the industry. They also wanted to know how my reviews were and what kinds of feedback I was getting. During my junior year all I had to show them was that I was interested in investment banking and that I had a good attitude. But now that I had a more tangible investment banking SA experience, I had to prove myself on a much higher level if I wanted them to push me through in the FT recruiting process.
All throughout June and the beginning of July I was constantly told that FT recruiting hadn't started and that there wasn't a real 'start' date for any firm. The process was much less structured than SA recruiting, simply because firms did not have an accurate count of how many people they needed to hire. Most firms couldn't even figure this out until after all the SAs who got offers accepted or rejected them.
Networking
I was, however, invited to a few networking events hosted by some BBs and EBs as early as mid July. The events ranged in size from 20 people to 50 or 60 people. All of the other students I met at these events were currently working in some sort of finance related internship. Most of them were SAs at different banks, but there were also kids from hedge funds, private equity firms, or other divisions of banks, like capital markets. The things we all had in common were that we were gaining skills that would be transferable to investment banking and that we had a connection/connections at the firm who were able to get HR to invite us to the event.
I didn't end up receiving an invitation to interview with all of the firms who invited me to these events, but I did end up interviewing with most of them. My first interviews were with EBs who knew that they wanted to expand their incoming analyst class, and these began around the last week of July and into the first week of August. At the time, I was still in my internship, so I had to balance the interviews with my workload. Luckily, I had a much lighter workload around the time I had my first few phone screens, so it wasn't difficult to leave the office for 30-45 minutes to do the interview. Everyone that I was speaking with was incredibly flexible with timing, and understood that my internship came first.
Superdays and Interviews
My superdays and interviews with BBs didn't start until after my internship had ended. As I mentioned before, this process was a lot less structured. All of my interviews with BBs were group-specific interviews, and I had received an invitation to interview because I had spoken to someone in the group who was able to push my resume through when the group learned that they needed to hire more 1st years. During this process, I had little contact with HR, as the process seemed to be run almost entirely by the group itself.
In every interview I had I was asked to talk about the following three things:
- Why I wanted to switch banks
- My deal experience
- If I received an offer
For the first question, I talked about deal flow and complexity of transactions, a more structured environment, and that I had gotten along with so many people at the firm I was interviewing with. I tried to refrain from saying anything directly negative about my MM firm, but rather portray myself and my career interests as a better fit for the firm I was interviewing with than with the MM firm.
Number 2 took up the bulk of all of my interviews. Again, these bankers needed to know that I learned a good deal in my internship and that I would be an asset to them. Throughout my summer, I was fortunate enough to work on a few live deals and saw some close before the summer ended. I studied these deals in great depth, making sure that I knew every detail, every number, every step in the process prior to each interview. Not only did I speak about the many details and my responsibilities on the deal team, I also tried to include my opinions of the deal and what I expected to happen in the future.
The third question was a make or break question. Most of the people I knew who didn't end up with offers ended up getting rejected during the FT recruiting process and most ended up moving to smaller firms or moving out of banking. Without a doubt, your first priority throughout the summer should be to get a return offer.
After my interviews I was fortunate enough to land a few offers.
My entire FT recruiting process was done by September. I do know of a some people who were still interviewing into September, but from my understanding, all of these just firms wanted to finish this process as fast as possible. Overall, though, it was an incredibly fast process, and it took much preparation beforehand to be ready and successful. Hopefully this can be of some help for you guys who want to go through FT recruiting and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.
