How One $5b Investment Manager Quickly Screened for Analysts
This is a common sense post. If you have common sense, you can move on. I'm posting because I realized that at least 300 of the 500 resumes I got had no common sense.
I think the following could apply for almost any corporate position in investment management, banking, consulting or some other competitive firm. I worked in a 30-person team at an institutional asset manager focused on alternatives. Analysts did a lot of manager meetings, cash flow modeling, powerpoints and investment recommendation reports.
Why Hire?
Why did we start hiring? Because we needed help. We were growing and swamped and needed more bodies to get work done. This should frame the entire process. Hiring was done out of necessity, it was not considered a fun activity (though I personally enjoyed it, unlike most people, perhaps). In general, nobody likes to take time away from what they have to do in order to hire someone. It's a painful process especially because most people that submit resumes have no clue.
Posting the Position
We posted the position on our company website and it was picked up by a few job hunting / career sites. Within a couple weeks we had about 500 resumes. I'm sure other companies get more submissions. Think about that - 500 resumes, and you are 1 of them.
Digital Resume Screeners
There was no way we were going to read every resume carefully, so first we used the resume screener to screen out anything below our minimum GPA mark, which cut the number of resumes to about 350. We could've screened for a lot more.
Manual Screen
Then we did a high level visual screen. About 30 seconds to a couple minutes per resume. We split up this work.
Do the resume have dates? Do the dates make sense? (No huge gaps without explanation)
Do the positions make sense? Are they relevant?
Is it a top tiered school?
Is the GPA high enough for the major? (We gave a 0.2 GPA handicap to engineers / scientists)
Does this person have common sense?
The easiest ones to toss were the resumes with ridiculous formatting. The shear lack of formatting and ridiculous content from some resumes still confounds me. Huge fonts, typos, awkward spacing, fonts that are too creative or anything funky gets put in the bin. Not that I'm not for creative resumes - that's ok, but there's something about understanding social norms and being able to relate to others in an industry. If you can't demonstrate a basic understanding of the target audience for your resume, you will not cut it in a meeting with an investment manager.
We also had a tough time with MBA, Masters and PhD submissions to an analyst position. Legally there's no way we can discriminate, but when it comes down to it, the best fit for an analyst position was someone with a strong, demonstrated interest in finance/investment management, from a top-tiered school, with a high GPA, a few internships under their belt and a well-rounded personality. We kept the non-traditional backgrounds in a separate pile and revisited them later.
This got us down to about 70 resumes.
Top Resumes
Each member of our recruiting team individually picked the top ~12 candidates. Then we compared the ones we picked and discussed. The ones that had overlap received phone interview invitations.
Phone Interviews
During the phone interview, we gave them half an hour, and we just took notes on each person. Here's where people got dinged:
-Too much talking or irrelevant information during "tell me about yourself". When we ask you a question, give us an answer so we can move on. We'll run out of time otherwise and you'll be at a disadvantage compared to those who were able to provide more info on our other talking points.
-No questions. You have to have at least 2-3 questions up your sleeve. No questions means you either have no interest or you just don't know how to make conversation.
-Late for the call. If you can't be punctual, we'll have a problem working together.
-Bad communicator. I talked to some very smart people with very high GPAs who simply can't communicate, making for awkward conversation or misunderstandings. These people could probably make great models, but would not be able to pitch or lead meetings.
-Oversold themselves on resume. If you can't explain a VLOOKUP you are not "highly proficient" in Excel.
-No basic knowledge. Know your basic interview questions. If you can't explain the concept of IRR and NPV, or if you can't walk me through an income statement, I doubt you'll be a helpful co-worker.
Those who made it through the phone interview received an invitation to come in for an in-person interview.
In-Person Interview
During the in-person interview, we gave a quick case study. We also gave an Excel test and watched for behavioral cues. Something as simple as dressing appropriately for an interview was not common sense for some people. For the case study, we sought people who could explain a logical thought process very clearly.
Final Interview
At the end, we had about 5 people left. We brought those people in for a final in-person interview and they sat with most teams from our group. Afterwards we all convened and discussed each candidate's performance. Personality really came into play - was the candidate arrogant? Weird? Knowledgeable? Fun to work with? Aside from all the prior criteria, ultimately we chose someone who we thought would work well with all teams and would be passionate about doing their grunt work and learning so they could work their way up.
The person we hired from this process about 2 years ago is doing very well and has been well-integrated into the group.
