Online Campus Recruiting, applying to multiple positions?

It's generally more acceptable if you are applying for summer internships as the banks will not expect you to have such a firm idea on what you want to do. Applicants for full-time should have a specific area they are interested in. Either way, they won't immediately toss out your resume - just have solid answers ready when they ask you what other positions you applied for and why.

Can more people comment on this, ideally those with recruiting experience. My impression is that the analysts sorting through your resume aren't going to know which divisions the applicants applied to.

Basically it doesn't look positively if you apply to every position a company lists. It might not come up, but it probably will. You will look either desperate or uncommitted.

If you are talking about applying to a bunch of different jobs at different companies through your schools job site, then that is fine. The company isn't going to know and your school isn't going to inform them that you have applied to 50 different positions.

If your question is can you apply to GS IB, Trading, Ops, and everything else, then no, pick what you want and apply to just that. If you apply to everything you will get nothing.

This worries me. I have been applying to both IB and S&T summer analyst positions. does this mean i should cancel some of these applications?

Yes. I should make my quesiton more specific. I meant that I am applying to multiple summer internship positions within the same firm on our school career website. So it's not okay to apply to EVERY position with the same company; however is it okay to apply to say 2 or 3 like IB and S&T?

We were told during the university OCR workshop to not do this. Most resume-drop resumes go through 1-2 analysts/HR for a university. So if they see your name for 5-6 different positions, you might come across as not being serious. However, it is acceptable to apply for multiple similar positions.

When I was applying for my internships a few years back, I applied for both S&T positions and IBD positions within the same firm. I didn't apply for MO, BO, PWM positions, but I did apply to both FO SA spots. I actually got interviews at a few places in both divisions, so I don't know if its looked upon that negatively. I think HR people know that it is extremely competitive, and people want to widen their options. I also think that the summer internship should be seen as a 10 week period where students can figure out what they really want to do full time. With that, if they get a position in IBD, do the their SA, and don't like it, they can apply to S&T for full time.

That being said, I do agree that many people think applying to multiple positions may make you look unfocused. It may be unfortunate, and not my personal opinion, but it is true, so consider which is more important to you when applying; potentially looking unfocused, or potentially increasing the number of interviews you get.

Once you get the interviews, make sure you emphasize that even though you applied to a few X positions, you are CLEARLY focused on getting a job in Y. Come up with a good reason you applied for the other position (maybe a connection you have there?).

Yes, apply to all of them. You're not expected to know exactly where you will fit at this point in time (I'm assuming you're applying to SA positions).

But during the interviews, you need to know the differences between IBD and S&T. For instance, do not come into a IBD interview and start talking about FX or Commodities.

On the other hand, you need to know about a variety of assets (stocks, fixed income, commodities, fx) for S&T.