The Pendulum Has Swung Way Too Far...

My firm (cough MS cough) has almost entirely filled its 2023 class with diversity candidates through our early insights programs. Un-fucking believeable... It's mid April and we haven't even gone through our regular non-div process yet. 

Got word that the last diversity superdays were wrapping last week — Reached out to HR earlier today trying to push for who I thought were the best candidates thinking that we would run a regular non-div process. This is what I hear back "The junior class is almost completely full at this point, it's unlikely that we will have the capacity to take anymore. We're reserving a few spots for the sophomore class, however. " What the flying fuck. The sophomore program is for diversity only as well. 

I'm on the recruiting team for one of the fucking ivies. We did on-campus coffee chats last week. Now I have to break the news to a bunch of poor kids that while we were running on-campus coffee chats, HR was handing offers out like candy through the early insights program. 

I have nothing against the diversity programs and understand that they're there for a reason. My issue is when 80-90% of a class is filled with diversity... That's way too fucking much. 

Rant over.

45 Comments
 
Controversial

It's sad that a lot of these recruits are going to show up for work and immediately be judged as only being there because they're diversity recruits. They will still be judged even if they are competent, hard workers, and otherwise good employees. And any little mess up that would otherwise be overlooked will be judged more harshly because of their situation. They took advantage of the opportunities that were given and there's nothing wrong with that on their part. It's just unfortunate that they will receive a lot of resentment from the office and have to fight an uphill battle to earn their respect.

 
Most Helpful

To be honest, I really don't think that's the case. Something I've noticed watching SA class after SA class go by is that interviewing performance and one's ability to understand the finance concepts during recruiting process doesn't really translate into one necessarily being better on the desk. For the most part, once the SAs and even analysts hit the desk, the vast majority of them are very similar in ability, with maybe a couple standouts per class, and the average analyst quickly ramps up and catches up to the individuals who were stand-outs at the beginning after a few months on the desk. There also really isn't any resentment based on who was a diversity hire. After the first few months, the true slackers fall behind the rest of the pack, and that's where slight resentment starts to breed, but based on what I've observed the correlation between being a diversity hire and an incompetent analyst really isn't high.

 

My intern class is 7 people; 5 woman, 1 diversity and me. Not complaining but I think it's a bit strange to try and reflect the population diversity when the people gunning for banking don't reflect the population diversity.

To be fair banking isn’t that hard.

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