Now I believe that you can get into investment banking without knowing what EBITDA is. This sounds totally unbelievable, but Emmanuel Macron, the new President did it. How he did it remains a mystery. How did he pass the first round/second round interview?
Congratulations on becoming the president Mr. Mac(a)ron.
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Because if you did your research you would know that he was not taken in for his technical skills but for his network from his time for the public services which they used thereafter ... the guy was in sales btw.
haha okay. Thx. I saw an article a couple days ago from FT about this. One of his colleagues said he didn't know what EBITDA was. Just think it's funny.
EBITDA is a non-GAAP measure so there really is no precise definition of what it is anyway.
Can you imagine a 30 year old walking around an IB asking people what ebitda means, that's wild
One of my directors used to have the summer analysts write and send emails for him. Either a complete boss or evidence that you don't need to know anything to work in IB if you have the right connects.
EBITDA isn't IFRS. He may have been familiar with IFRS.
Fuck it. You just write "French" in the languages section of your resume and the interviewer asks you what the term for EBITDA is in French. Happened to me. Twice.
Mais c'est le BAIIDA (bénéfice avant intérêts, impôts, dépréciation et amortissement), bien sûr.
I once tried to learn as much French financial terms as I could for a French-language interview and began describing a project that involved financial modeling. I went on for a few minutes as my interviewer looked at me blankly, let me finish, and finally said in English, "You know, we just use the English terms for that here. I don't even know what you just said."
A similar situation happened to me when I was interviewing with a tech company. Interviewer asked me to write code for a particular DS task and handed me a pen and paper. I spent a good twenty-five minutes on the inexorably painful problem (which went on up to five pages of code), before completing it. Turned back after I was done to look at the guy's reaction, and he just stared at me blankly. "Oh, it's so cool you could do that. But honestly, I can't proofread it. I have no idea what you just did. Just asked to see if YOU could do it. Let's move on."
Mr Quattrone, does Qatalyst recruit master students? Thanks.
AFAIK, MBAs and MSFs.
Macron was one of the highest ranked graduates of l'ENA, the French administration school (think Harvard Law, except it's a public institution that you can enter after anonymous written exams and oral interviews). If anything, it proved very lucrative for Rothschild since he was the one who closed a multi-billion dollar deal with Nestlé.
Macron went into Rotschild without much IB-specific knowledge because of his network.
Long story short, he'd worked with Jacques Attali, a well known french economist, as Rapporteur of the Attali Commission he led, which itself had been apointed by President Sarkozy to brainstorm on economic policies for his '07-'12 term.
Attali has an extensive network of french industry and IB leaders and happened to know François Henrot, which was David de Rotschild's right arm at the time. Attali proceeded to introduce Macron to Henrot , which was impressed with Macron's capabilities and directly hired him as an ED (Directeur) in the IBD division.
He then went onto MD (Associé-Gérant) promotion in Dec '10 and advised Nestlé on the sale of its infantile milk division (~€9bn).
Macron left to work for President Hollande as an advisor when he took office in 2012.
A lot of elite french IBs (ROTH/LAZ) like to hire graduates of ENA / Ecole Normale Supérieure / Sciences Po Paris (think H/Y/P) that have more or less 5 years previous public work experience, especially for their Sovereign Advisory branches.
This is a very comprehensive explanation. However, I will keep skeptical on the EBITDA part jaja
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