When did banking recruiting get so hard?
Back in my day (which wasn't all that long ago) all you needed was a 3.5+ GPA, some kind of finance work experience (PWM in your home town was totally fine), and a halfway decent personality and you could land a solid BB or MM job (I went to a semi-target). Interviews were held on campus after Christmas break of your junior year (i.e. 6 months before starting your SA job) according to a strict / predictable schedule, and networking only helped on the margin (it was by no means a necessity).
Nowadays you've got kids recruiting for their junior year summer before spring break of their sophomore years, networking with multiple people at every bank, BB internships their freshman year summer, 3.9+ GPAs, and a whole lot more. Looking back, I would have been nowhere near competitive today even if I was in a position to get multiple offers back in the day.
What changed? When did it get so difficult? Are incoming analysts really that much better prepared?
It's just like with any industry over time...things evolve. the average NBA player right now is probably 2x better than the average player during Jordan's days, making Lebron the GOAT. Same with college admissions, admission rates go down and things get harder every year. most people who got into harvard 30 years ago have no chance today with a focus on diversity, essays, and bullshit like that
Yeah man, I'll give you an analogy. UChicago had a 40% acceptance rate in 2004. Today it's below 5% for some schools inside the university... It's just that more people have access to apply to these jobs. I'm sure there are a ton of people that couldn't have competed in today's world. It's gonna keep getting worse.
UChicago had a higher acceptance rate because of the self-selecting applicant pool. The essays were very off-putting and so most of the kids who ended up applying there were very keen on it to begin with. I remember looking at it in 2003 when I was applying for college. There weren''t as many applicants as they are today and whoever applied was usually a top-of-the-class.
Probably the internet. It levels the playing field, with respect to knowledge and access. Doing things manually, you didn't want to apply to 25 schools... now with common app and internet, it's easy. Same for applying to banks -- go on their web site, few clicks, boom, you've applied. Also, internet allows you to reach out to alums and strangers who already work at bank, who can help you out and push your resume through. Also, can go online (to places like, oh, I don't know, WSO) and figure out what you need to do to improve your chances.
It's the internet, baby. Changes everything.
I'd like to know how hard IB recruiting was relative to other top undergrad opportunites (MBB?) at the time you were recruiting. Relatively, has banking always been harder? Or maybe banking has become relatively harder?
I definitely think the entire IB recruiting is more competitive and stressful than MBB. Cold emails, networking calls, finance experience, etc. The actual interview process seems to be harder at consulting shops. I may be biased, but I find case studies to be much harder than banking interview questions.
I also found case interviews way harder, IB interviews is just regurgitating previously memorized answers to the same technical questions. For cases yeah there's a common strategy but you still need to apply some knowledge to something you have never seen before, which only happened to me a few times in IB interviews.
My school pushed consulting much more than banking so might be a bit biased here, but always seemed the top performers went more towards banking than consulting. It seemed like less qualified kids were getting consulting offers where as equally qualified kids going for banking were not. I think a better alumni network at MBB helped in that regard, but I think in general everything leading up to the interview for banking is more of a pain in the ass than it is for consulting (networking, cold emailing, black box resume drops, etc.)
Banking is not and has never been harder to get than MBB. Directly comparing GS/MS/PJT vs MBB, then it's a discussion.
Really? Why do you think so?
lol so inaccurate... the people from my target who didn’t get IB returns are the ones who went for MBB. In general the top people all went IB
GS/MS/JP and MBB are of comparable difficulty - saw equally talented individuals going to both.
Entry into undergrad consulting (even for T2 firms below MBB) is extremely competitive and there are very few spots available at this level.
Also thought that the minimum requirements for getting an MBB interview were a bit higher in terms of GPA etc. than banking in general.
As an MBA associate who recruited 7 years ago, I can tell you the questions I ask our summer ANALYST candidates are harder than what I was asked. We ask these 20 year olds to do paper accretion/dilution, for instance. Such is the nature of evolution.
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