How difficult is it to break into IB?
How exactly difficult is it? How many applicants are there and how many actually get in? I am very curious
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Disclaimer: I'm a summer intern, so can't speak on FT. I'd say it completely depends on your situation. A top target student with a 4.0 won't have much issue breaking into IB as long as they're reasonably competent and vice versa. All you can really do is set yourself up the best you can to maximize your odds of securing offers. With relevant experience, a good school, a high gpa, and networking, you'll likely land something—now, how good that "something" is depends on a lot of factors, luck being one of them. Obviously, none of those are required to break in, they’ll just make your life easier. That’s my 2 cents.
Even further, it all depends on how committed you are to the position. I just went through SA recruiting as well so can’t speak to FT yet. However, I come from a target school, non-diverse, comparatively average GPA, non finance major with prior experience only being in public policy. Decided to 180 and pivot to private sector and began reaching out to whoever I could see working as a AN1 on LinkedIn from my school. First calls went horrible but started picking up how to talk about common technical questions and what ways to talk about a deal. Remember each conversation you have and build you skills on it, treat your first couple of calls as trial rounds (so don’t have your first call be at Goldman). Keep your fingers crossed and pray to get first round interviews, in the meantime network network network, subtly try to see if people will refer you or if it’s a dead end. Then, none of that matters after the first round invitation. Grind like a maniac like a fucking hormonal acne-faced 8th grader at his first school dance to learn the technical questions (400 breaking into Wall Street). Don’t fucking memorize them. Understand them, kick aside your pride, and ask someone smarter to fill in the gaps if you don’t know. Then play the interviewing game, obviously know your technicals but be as charismatic as possible and play the interviewer, know who you’re talking to and what kind of conversation they’d like to hear. Determine whether to speak fast or slow and whether to be a technical god or a homie. Then, they’ll advance and give you a SD, take it and run.
all in, obviously being from target school helps a ton but a lot of these large numbers of applicants drive low acceptance rates because kids applying for SA positions grind but then get burnt out and lazy at the last hour. Obviously non targets get the short end of the stick and can’t even get first rounds without giving up their firstborn, but so many target kids can’t interview because they don’t even know what IB even is. Just play your game and be fucking good at it and you’ll get a solid offer.
Depends on how hard you prep and on your background like others mentioned. Also depends on what kind of firm you want to go to. Generally speaking, competition is intense.
Bulge brackets and boutiques like LAZ/CVP/EVR have around 2-4% accept rates (guesstimate). In my school conference composed of mostly semitargets, ~25% of applicants got a first round at one of those boutiques and only 2% got internship offers.
Even at the private equity firm I'm interning at now, the acceptance rate was 1% out of a bit under a thousand applicants. When even those stepping stone internships have such low accept rates, it's easy to see the difficulty of breaking in.
Full-time recruiting is another matter and is even more difficult in general.
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