The brutal SA 2027 cycle & trends for future
A bit of a long rambling post but wanted to share my own insights in case it's helpful. Recruiting season is back in full swing, and for the North American SA 2027 cycle, I’m seeing three very clear trends:
- Everyone is grinding harder, yet first-round interviews are becoming increasingly rare
- The rise of nepo babies
- The gap between target and non-target schools is narrowing significantly
Even the HYPSW (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Wharton) crowd who used to get interviews just by hitting "submit" are staring at empty inboxes. A mentee I know at H/S has a stacked resume: Tiger Club internship, perfect GPA/SAT, and massive networking reach across the board. As of late January, he’s landed exactly one interview. I don't think it's an outlier, more of the new reality.
In previous cycles we could maybe blame DEI for the squeeze. But with the recent dismantling of DEI-focused early programs, that excuse is dead. If you look at most Superday lists now, DEI representation is at a record low.
With DEI out of the picture, HR has lost its gatekeeping power. The first result? MDs are shamelessly slotting in relationship hires (nepo babies). The second? Networking is now everything. Resume selection is back entirely in the hands of the bankers, making recruiting feel more "pure" but also much more cutthroat.
Bottom line: the hurdle this year isn't how well you interview, it’s whether you even get seen at all.
So how do you beat the system? Personally I think you need to focus on "un-fuckable" talent. The kind of technical and profile strength that hedges against every policy shift and market variable.
Many processes that were once exclusive to targets have opened up to everyone. While the total volume of first-rounds has dropped, the bar for selection has gone up. Because firms are picking from a much higher-caliber pool, the technicals have become significantly harder. But there’s an upside: the number of seats on the street hasn’t changed. If you actually manage to land an interview, your conversion rate to an offer is statistically much higher.
The playing field is levelling. Whether it’s race or school pedigree, the "shortcuts" are disappearing. You need to prove your worth with raw ability. Recruiting cycles will only get earlier and more hardcore from here.
Stay strong and lock in.
The gap between target and non-Target is the most interesting part of this. Banks have realized that a top-tier student from a state school who fought for the seat is often more resilient than a legacy Ivy hire who expected it. The Street is tired of training juniors from scratch.
Uncle went to Stanford for UG on a full ride. Had a very humble lower class background so this was not through connections, it was from outworking the competition. One summer he took a few courses at a local community college to try and graduate quicker. He said the top 2-3% of students at that community college were just as impressive as the top 2-3% as Stanford, and their work ethics were comparable as well.
I went to a very mid uni. The top 1% of students there had higher compute power and stronger work ethics than the majority of my friends at semis. One of them, as an intern, could model better than most Associates at his investment bank. No this was not my opinion, an Associate at said bank told me in confidence after I had worked there a year. When I left M&A, I still was less technically proficient than he was as intern. Sounds made up, but he was a savant, and is now one of the youngest VPs at one of the top 3 banks in the US.
The top 2-5% of students at shit schools are not shit students, they likely chose those schools because 1. Got a full ride, 2. Faced adversity during high school, or 3. Had a limited understanding of how critical it is to choose a top uni despite being intellectually gifted. What is common knowledge to many of us on this site is not to always known by those with blue collar parents trying to give their children the best opportunities.
This is spot fucking on. Describes so many people I know. And I truly think banks are waking up to this reality. EBs in particular (and Moelis, Evercore, especially). Just went thru SA recruiting so don’t have a ton of perspective, but I’d imagine this is a net positive for the industry. Hard working, highly motivated, top 5-10% of class non target will be a better analyst than an average target kid.
Every bit of this is true.
Great comment and appreciate you shedding light on the high school adversity piece, I think it's a super underrated point. High school is a tough time for a lot of people. I myself had pretty severe depression during high school and the start of university. I'm doing well in consulting but frankly I would not have made it into certain super competitive fields that need you to be on point from age 18 onwards to even have a shot. There is a certain privilege, or luck, in going through high school with little adversity in my view.
Great comment and very true.
To be fair a lot of ivy kids are also fighting quite hard for the seat
He’s just saying the average state school kid who got an offer tried harder than the average target school kid who got one
Supply: You are seeing one of the biggest college student population coming into the funnel. 2024 and 2025 have some of the highest number of hs graduates. These students are stacked because many of the top students grinded hard through Covid while the rest went south.
College admission officers were splitting hairs in 2024 and 2025. Now hr is probably splitting hairs in recruiting. WSO is the new A2C for folks.
Demand: Despite the large M&A activities last year, you suspect that the class size will increase. But it sounds like it decreased in some cases or remained the same.
Can't agree more. As soon as I got into an Ivy League I left A2C and joined WSO
Please stop with the AI posts :-(
Sir I promise you I wrote this from my own notes app lol :(
GPT Zero has you at 91% AI detection lmao. I think it's a good post and I'm sure a lot of original thought, but could tell by tone was cleaned up by AI
then you suck at writing and are probably imitating the GPT slop you stare at all day. This was a painful read even if your message was valuable.
"The playing field is levelling. Whether it’s race or school pedigree, the "shortcuts" are disappearing. You need to prove your worth with raw ability. Recruiting cycles will only get earlier and more hardcore from here."
Yet there are more nepos than ever.
del
Being able to talk ur way into and out of anything, being rock solid on technicals, having deal experience, and getting seen and liked by as many bankers on the recruiting team as possible
This post is partially correct. The number of seats hasn’t declined – if anything, it’s increased slightly. However, the sheer volume of applicants has probably doubled in the past 3 - 5 years. This cycle, my bank took a significant number of SAs from state schools and other schools we never would have looked at in the past. There is just so much more competition for a very finite number of seats.
Do you happen to know why the non target thing is true? At my Ivy only a handful of people got offers. Saw some extremely qualified people end up with nothing…
Can completely relate to this post and I think this is very transparent - I go to a solid target with a phenomenal freshman internship on my resume (T10 hedge fund). Don't come from a corporate background at all, just took the opportunities that were given to me, and none of the banks that I networked hardest with gave me R1s. Got a few buyside R1s, and a few solid sell-side interviews, some of which have absurdly strung out processes. Makes me consider finishing a degree and getting a MSc Fin in the EU, or taking completely different path. The percentages are truly decreasing, and I feel that the qualifications I bring to the table certainly clear a lot of my senior counterparts here at school that broke in a couple of years ago with many more R1s.
The number of applications has increased year after year, so it naturally has gotten exponentially harder to land interviews for an unchanged amount of spots. The easiest way to differentiate yourself is to be as well-rounded as possible - perfect technicals, knowledgeable current events, great interviewing skills, and most importantly... AMAZING social skills. Bankers don't want to work with an intern just bc they are from a T10 anymore, it's simply not enough to set you apart at most firms. You need to be able to actually hold a conversation with someone and be likeable - something which state school frat bros are a lot better at than ivy league hardos (typically).
del
In terms of the future for traditional M&A banking, I don't see it ever really changing unless some multi-decade cyclical event occurs where a new generation moves to trades or something and suddenly white-collared talent is rare. Look at the job market like the stock market. Where the capital sits is where the market is most efficient, similar to how where all the talent is flowing (especially in a matured industry like traditional M&A and Buyout PE) is where the hiring process is the most competitive. Look for areas where the market isn't saturated and there's a need for talent. If you position yourself correctly you can have much more reasonable processes and get comped better for your hours.
Nepo has always been around. It's more that top tier resumes don't matter as much and the industry isn't growing.
why did you steal the post from xhs lol
Welcome to the Chinese century
dude, y'all are acting like recruitment got so hard. at a semi-target and all the non-retarded people in my class placed really well
second this
Just because vandy got 20 nepo placements into gs this year doesn't mean it's a semi target
I laughed out loud.
I have been in touch with many students across universities this year who are recruiting. I can confirm that DEI is not dead and Nepotism is still vibrant. Know kids who are extremely skilled and want to do banking who have not gotten looks, whereas the more diversity candidates in similar clubs / schools have gotten many looks.
del
Hiring process has been pure pain for years.
Hiring process has been pure pain for years.
Hiring process has been pure pain for years.
so interesting the similarities & differences between NA and UK/EMEA recruiting trends. I feel like it's still very different in London - i wonder why the timeline hasn't slowly gone even earlier like NA yet.
Feel like this post and the comments are largely off the mark. I’m an analyst at a brand name bank, and the recruiting seems to be largely through HR just the same unless you come from a target school, so it’s the same system as before. What I will say, is the amount of AI slop and volume of students has gone up. The amount of copy paste emails I get is ridiculous. I was always told to write emails with at least one personal connection so the banker would know I at least spent some time to read their LinkedIn. It baffles me the lack of email etiquette I get from even these top schools. Kids getting names wrong, firms wrong, and just straight up mass emailing with their AI written scripts. I get it, we all probably made some mistakes on an email or two during our own recruiting processes, but when the sheer amount of awareness around going to and competing for top schools / jobs has gone up and kids can have ChatGPT do everything for them, the application processes are obviously going to get clogged up. Got to love those day in the life videos on TikTok spreading awareness lol. Just my two cents
I used to spend 5-10 minutes on every email I sent out with personalized connections and everything. Guess what, out of 100 emails, I probably got 3 replies. I decided to spend that same amount of time sending 500 emails and getting 10.
Fair enough. Conversely, when I spent 5-10 minutes on each email I had probably close to a 25-50% hit rate on responses. Anecdotal sure, but now that I’m on the desk I’m certainly not responding to the 0 effort emails, and I know many who feel the same.
It feels like far too many people are going to college without a clear sense of direction or what career they actually want to pursue. Also wayy too many kids doing finance
.
Everyone else has good points and I don't want to bog people down with the same stuff.
I understand it is difficult and it is a very messed-up process, but for one I know it is possible to succeed because I come from a middle-income (White/Asian) background, and am now at T10 + SM HF + Top EB. 0 connections in the industry. A good chunk of my analyst class has similar backgrounds.
Nepotism is not great, but it will never go away. Just as schools "remove" legacy, there are still many you can call "legacy-students". There are the private hs kids at Dalton/Trinity/Exeter/Andover/Hotchkiss who only dream about finance, the rich internationals who pay obscene amounts of money, and the sweaty non-targets/Stern kids sending 400 emails a day.
These jobs are meant to be difficult to attain, and it really does fucking suck. Just try your best, and success is not linear. You WILL be fine. We live in an era where you can start your own company or Instagram account and make millions, rather than having a corporate desk job making 200k a year while sacrificing your life.
I will be entering into the SA 2028 recruiting cycle next year. I go to a non-target. Is it too early to start networking with bankers?
Yeah I’d start doing a couple informational interviews rn. Possibly reach out to 1 or 2 ppl for now so u can get some practice. But don’t network heavy rn.
And imma be honest SA 2028 is going to be brutal. I’m recruiting from a Non-Target this recruiting cycle and it’s extremely brutal rn. So yea my recommendation is to start early. And even if I’m not successful def happy I went thru the process because I learned a lot from it and it makes recruiting for other things easier since you know what mistakes you made and how to do better.
Definitely not too early to start networking. I come from a non-target, am a sophomore right now who is still recruiting, and I'm kicking myself for wishing I had started networking this time last year or at the start of my freshman-year summer. Reach out to ask to chat because you're interested in their career and their firm. Establish a connection. If the call goes well, ask if you can have more colleagues at their firm, either within or outside their group (depending on what you're looking for). Once the connection is established, if you establish it at this point freshman year, reach back out to them come April or May 2026, asking for a behavioral mock interview (prepare for it). Then reach back out come the beginning of August 2026 as the official recruitment cycle begins for the class of 2028 to touch base, if you want to, and I'd recommend doing a technical mock interview with them at this point. Additionally, perhaps in hindsight, after writing this, it may be good to hold off on asking for referrals until this point in August (your 3rd time connecting with them) so that they have seen 3 things. 1. Your behavioral answers. 2. Your Technical Answers. and 3. Your interest in the bank, which is represented by the repeated effort to connect with them.
The industry needs better pre-interview screening methods.
There are essentially 3 reasons people fail nowadays:
1 - Serious Resume Flaw (Low GPA / Zero dedicated interest)
2 - Bad Interviewing Ability
3 - Didn't spam enough emails to analysts
In my opinion the third filter is undesirable here. Would like to see some merit-based method of qualification (like an online assessment) which in conjunction with a sufficient resume would guarantee any prospect a 20-min chat regardless of how hard they spammed analysts' inboxes.
Long story short: work harder than everyone else if you really want it
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