I have a long history of posting on WSO and if you've read my posts before, it's no secret that I am in BO at a BB. I came to the firm as a mid-career professional after having a background in consulting, tech and a variety of other companies. I now lead a team of 15 people, I'm making more money than I ever have and net-net, it's been a great move for my career. I knew of WSO prior to this move and I am grateful for all of the things I picked up as a reader while I was in the process of landing my current role.
Recruiting season is now upon us and I was once again an interviewer for our Superdays. Believe it or not, as much as these Superdays make you nervous as applicants, it can also be brutal on us as interviewers! We held 4 of them back-to-back and I saw 8 candidates on each day. So, quite a few interviews, to say the least.
While I did state that I work in BO, I think that a lot of the advice I can give will apply to FO & BO and I'll add the following to tickle your brain with different ideas for questions I will answer:
- I have done interviews for both summer and full-time roles coming to us fresh from graduation. Some of those people now work for me and it's nice to see their career progression.
- I have participated in all aspects of recruiting. I've manned the promo tables on campus, I've done initial resume reads, first round interviews, Superdays, behaviorals, case studies. I'm even one of the people that gets to call you and tell you that you got the position - those are fun calls!
- As you can guess, it's not my first year doing this; I estimate that I've seen anywhere from 200-300 applicants in my interview room. I can't even begin to think about how many resumes I've read, easily double that number. I know that sounds high, but I can easily come home with 100+ resumes from a single OCR event. Or HR often sends me 30-60 resumes to narrow the field for first round interviews. So, yeah, 400-600 resumes sounds (about) right.
Finally, I'm putting this out there as a helper for all of you young folks. But please remember this: Don't fall into the trap of thinking that recruiting out of college and landing that oh-so-perfect BB job is something that you have to do or you will be crushed to death! If recruiting season doesn't go the way you want it to, don't worry!
You have a long career ahead of you and you never know if you'll end up in Finance later in your career, just like I did. I see so many kids put a ton of pressure on themselves and it's not healthy. Recruiting is tough, hang in there, do your best and things will work out just like they are intended to be.
When you receive a resume, what is the first thing you look at? If a candidate decides to leave his/her gpa off their resume, is that something you note or might raise a brow at? What if they have outstanding work experiences? Thank you.
The first thing I look at would be the major and the school they went to. But I don't look at this for the reasons you might think, we dont expect everyone to come to us from HYP. We actually want diversity in schools and majors too (I've hired all kinds of majors). So I may look there first just to make sure we're not getting another "cookie cutter" applicant.
The missing GPA is definitely problematic. If that's the case, it will come up during the interview. It behooves you to decide that you either want to put it on there or you better have a reasonable response to it during the interview. If I was in your position, I would choose to be upfront and include it on the resume.
At the risk of sounding cynical, what do you consider to be "outstanding work experience"? We fully understand that you are still in school, we don't expect you to have some deeply meaningful stuff on there. The things that are much more likely to catch attention are your extra-curriculars. If I think about what's caught my eye, I would say its things like Eagle Scout/Gold Award, starting a charity, extensive volunteer work, sport team captain for multiple years, things like that.
What are the common resume mistakes? Can you give us more tips? Thanks!
You might gain some more insight from my answer to the question above. But as far as overall mistakes, I will add:
As a 30+ yr professional, I can't reiterate enough how important this message is. Thank you sooo much for doing this!!! These kids NEED a major dose of reality regarding communication skills, behavioral skills, and the fact that this is just their first job, not a career or personal defining moment.
What did the best candidates you have interviewed do to stand out?
This question really got me thinking. And I'm coming up with the conclusion that it's not about standing out, its more about making sure that it goes well. In other words, I'm much more likely to remember when you completely bomb an interview than to stand out. I may interview, what, 30-40 people in a week. So it's near impossible to stand out, but super easy to blow it. I hope that's coming across in the right way. To that end, here's how you blow it:
Here's couple good things from past interviews. But again, it's more important to not blow it than be focused on standing out:
>"GoingToBeAnMD"
>Likes to be called sir
>Penis less than 2 inches
All checks out
Do you want a blowjob with all that too?
What was your most unconventional hire? What was the lowest GPA of your hires? Was there an incident where somebody spun something not so good into something great, if yes, what was it?
Thank you
There's a good part and a bad part to this answer.
GOOD
I'm modifying the details a little bit here but my answer still holds - About 2 years ago I had a candidate that had basically zero office experience and he was also a little older than our usual summer analysts. I'm doing this from memory but he was coming to us from being a machinist at a factory in the region (again, I'm obfuscating here, but he had a very blue collar background, no office experience on his resume at all). He was coming from an average school but had a good GPA and had a really good attitude and had researched our company and position prior to applying. He was basically someone that didn't want to work in a machine shop the rest of his life and picked himself up and went to school and was now applying for his first office job. I was his first-round interview and I was impressed - he had a great attitude, really humble guy and was basically well-prepared for the interview. I recommended him for the summer program, he landed it and I went on to be one of his mentors for the summer. I ask all my kids to keep me informed on whether they got the full-time offer or not and he sent me an e-mail telling me that he landed it and he called his mom with tears in his eyes telling her that he didn't have to be a machinist any more. Not going to lie, that one got to me a little and I had an extra whiskey that night in his honor.
BAD
The bad part of my answer - and this is where I'm going to lose some of you - is that stories like the above don't happen every day and the people with low GPAs are always looking for ways to "pull up" from that or "hey, I can explain it away". But the reality is that low GPAs are usually reflected in other ways such as your overall attitude, your recommendations, your answers during the interviews, etc. Some of these ways you may not even realize you're doing, but they happen. I know this is not going to be a popular opinion - but sometimes there really is just no/little opportunity to recover from a bad GPA. It's just like your credit score will be later in life, it's a convenient, quantitative way to rank people, so a low GPA will work against you.
Boring generic advice from guy who wants to feel important
Most of this is absolutely garbage advice. Anyone reading this - please do not take note of any of this. Back office mentality clearly on show here. There are many more insightful and helpful career posts on WSO - this is not one of them.
This is literally the boomer "nice firm handshake and a good attitude" meme personified, this is useless advice
The very first thing I would do is check for the veteran "transition to work" style programs that some of the large banks offer. Some of them are very generous and bring you in at a high level depending on your equivalent military experience. I know of one BB that will be bring in some military officers at the Director level, which is a huge leg up.
The next thing I would do is to highlight any leadership experience/courses that you may have attended in the military. All other things being equal, leadership training is always looked on favorably by interviewers and most people want that on their teams. Heck, make it a whole section on your resume if you can, really make it stand out, really describe the training involved in each course.
Finally, really get to know the officer levels at the banks you're applying to and don't be afraid to go for some of the higher ones. If you think that a person you see on LinkedIn (or whatever) is close to you in age and they are officer level Y then go after similar levels. You might be pleasantly surprised at how well that can work out for you.