How competitive is EB investment banking recruiting nowadays?
I heard a figure from an EB I’m joining (EVR, LAZ, PJT) from someone who ran recruiting and I’m speechless… less than 5% of total applicants were accepted for the 2023 SA cycle. That’s 5% of a competitive, finance savvy applicant pool.
Could anyone else corroborate some numbers? I go to a top target and we unfortunately didn’t do too hot with placements as we did with previous years. There were at least a couple hundred kids who recruited for a SA gig. That’s one school… and some shops like PWP literally have less than 25 spots for their entire class.
Feeling extremely grateful to made it through… but I also can’t help but feel that this whole process feels a little wrong.
Side note, I know BB recruiting is also competitive, but again those figures are skewed due to non-finance people applying just for the sake of it. Your average college student has never heard of Moelis or Centerview before.
US EB in London insights here:
The firm I was working with received around 200 applications for each SA position filled
And that is for one of the smaller boutiques in London you mentioned (PJT/PWP/CVP/Q)
Would imagine it to be similar for the larger independents like Evercore and Lazard
Imagine the acceptance rate at places EB RX lol
PJT/HL/EVR have a class size of 8-10 - let's take 9 as average
Just from a place like Wharton, they receive around 150 apps, add other ivies and all big schools (UVA, NYU, Duke, Umich, Northwestern...) - call it 50 from each school (RX is not that popular everywhere, but safe to add 50*10 target schools = 500 people
Plus all the non-targets, let's say other 500 people (realistically these groups are impossible from non-targets)
Acceptance rate at single firm = 9/1150= 0.7%
Let's group the three groups together as it is more realistic given overlap of students=27/1150=2.1%
Easy to see how that going below 5% acceptance rate is very realistic - and people who apply to this group have a decent understand of finance I would say (differently from thousands applying to GS NY)
Great way of breaking it down, could you do the same for a typical BB? Just curious how much “easier” it is.
Here I am not sure so I am going to make a lot of assumptions
Let's do top BB
Class size: 100
From a place like Wharton/Penn, they receive around 400 apps, add other ivies and all big schools (UVA, NYU, Duke, Umich, Northwestern...) - call it 150 from each school so we add 150*10 big target schools = 1500 people
Plus all the non-targets, here it is hard to calculate: I would say there are around 600 undergraduate business schools, an average of 15 people might be fair since a ton of schools might not be big for banking or just apply to regional offices so; 600*15=18000. Here I might be totally off to be honest
Acceptance rate at single firm = 100/20000= 0.5%
Let's group the three top BB together together as it is more realistic given overlap of students=300/20000=1.5%
I am not at a BB and am making tons of assumptions but you also need to remember that qualified applicants go to boutiques first timeline wise so this BB percentage is probably not as accurate as EB RX. Also, a lot of non-target send application but realistically no one will ever read those so for decent candidates these percentages mean nothing
Is this class size of 8-10 in NY? Or everywhere
Only NY. They'll take a few more for London office, and I believe HL has a decent sized class in LA, Chicago, etc as well unlike EVR and PJT which only recruit for NY.
For Jefferies 2021 IB Summer Analysts NY (generalist pool):
Total spots: 60
Applications: ~8000
Acceptance rate: 0.75%
No. of applications per spot: 133.33
You're right, the applicants to an EB are much more competitive since only the informed would know about them and apply -- and yet they receive tons of applications so they are extremely competitive. From an exact percentage/figure wise, I have no clue about EB vs BB. However, anecdotally and from personal experience (both myself and having recruited closely with a small group of friends), the bar for EBs are much much higher and processes more difficult. BBs asked very standard, straightforward technicals and behaviourals (even GS/MS/JP) but the questions my friends and I received in interviews with EVR/MOE/LAZ were incredibly harder (there were some that we hadn't even heard of). The bar is much higher as well, you can afford to miss a few technicals or answer some behaviourals poorly and still get an offer from a BB, but miss 1-2 questions at an EB and it's a ding.
Analyst at a Tier 1 EB group also told us that the candidates they were screening were insane with multiple people attempting to accelerate (cited this one kid who had an offer from JP NY but they didn't accelerate him just because the overall candidate pool was too strong).
edit: source: recruited closely and extensively with a few friends for the West Coast, headed to an EB next summer (CVP PA/SF/LAZ HC/MOE LA/EVR MP)
Calcs based on % success rates are doomed to overestimate the difficulty of actually landing these jobs. if you're good and you put in the work, the odds of landing at at least one of your top 3-5 choices are much much higher...
1-3 percent success rates seem totally reasonable. Would love to know the demographic information about successful applicants also. Non diversity chances likely sub 1%.
its important to differentiate between non div kids who grind really hard like ur supposed to vs kids who had 3 networking calls and said they grinded. odds of success are way higher for non div kids who grind really hard. source myself from a non target non div who saw myself and the other kids who grinded super hard get something vs other who kids who didnt do much got nothing.
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