Accelerated Interviews - recommended?

As full-time recruiting approaches, some firms have made it known there are accelerated interviews. In your experience, do they give you a better shot at landing a gig?

I'm afraid that some spots may fill up before firms come on campus in the fall, and therefore make the process more difficult. On the other hand, the additional prep between the accelerated interviews and on-campus recruiting will certainly come in handy.

How should I think about this? Thanks in advance.

 

Do you think that helped your friends? My big question is - does the accelerated process give you any other benefits besides possibly securing a job earlier and/or not being forced to take a return offer.

 

The odds are always better when there's more spots left to fill. That's why generally speaking, firms schedule final round interviews for schools in their order of preference. Ie. 2 Fridays for targets, 1 Friday for non-targets, and 1 last Friday for other applicants. It's a lot easier to justify giving someone who is borderline an offer if there's still 15 spots left to fill, vs only 3 spots left.

As far as I remember, the first round to final round conversion for accelerated interviews was abnormally high (based on a limited sample size). A number of applications were withdrawn before the final round as people found other offers, and I think the final round to offer conversion was near 100%.

Imo, if you don't feel ready, you shouldn't go ahead with the interviews in August, but if you're being offered an accelerated schedule, I'd definitely try to slot yourself in before FT OCR gets fully underway.

 

Yes. Accelerated interviews, in my understanding, do offer better odds (holding all else equal). If a firm doesn't need many full-time hires, it will hope to only conduct accelerated recruiting. In addition, even if a firm does plan to conduct accelerated and "regular" recruiting for full-time, it will consider "deferring" strong accelerated candidates. I.e., even if a firm limits the amount of spots it will fill via accelerated, if they felt you were a strong candidate, they will also consider you against the "regular" full-time candidates.

"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."
 

For companies with structured recruiting calenders, accelerated interviews are typically for high caliber candidates with exploding offers from other firms (e.g. where they did their internship). Since only strong candidates are even offered an accelerated interview, it stands to reason that those candidates stand a better chance of getting an offer. I believe similarly qualified candidates will stand similar chances in both accelerated and full-time interviews. However, as the candidate, you'll have to weigh the pros and cons for yourself, e.g. shorter prep time vs. earlier decision

 
Best Response
Anonymous.:

For companies with structured recruiting calenders, accelerated interviews are typically for high caliber candidates with exploding offers from other firms (e.g. where they did their internship).
Since only strong candidates are even offered an accelerated interview, it stands to reason that those candidates stand a better chance of getting an offer. I believe similarly qualified candidates will stand similar chances in both accelerated and full-time interviews.
However, as the candidate, you'll have to weigh the pros and cons for yourself, e.g. shorter prep time vs. earlier decision

I agree 100% with this. The sense I got was that they hold the candidates to the same standard, and they turn away a good portion of Accelerated Interview candidates.

The only time I would actually take the accelerated interview is

A. If you have a return offer that has a deadline before FT recruiting. B. if you get an Accelerrated Interview that lets you skip first round and go directly to final round. (This is reserved for a small number of candidates who did extremely well in internship recruiting but didn't get an offer for one reason or another.)

Otherwise, I'd wait. Consulting recruiting is very structured, and there'll always be spots left for target students.

I did accelerated interviews for an MBB and botched it up pretty bad because I just wasn't prepared enough.

 

Hmmm..the only issue is that I really only have about 5/6 mocks behind me and my mental math is still lacking a little. And tough to dedicate much time to it right now with my bad hours at work.

Feel like my interview would go really shitty if i took it haha

 

The accelerated process was open for application to the students invited to the information session, which were hand-picked from the class (about 40-50 kids). The number of people at the sessions is higher than the interview slots, so it may not translate directly into an interview...

 

The accelerated process is generally for people who are interns at other banks. Reason being that by the time firms come to campus for FT recruiting, the internship offers would have exploded. This way the interns have a chance to switch banks before coming up against their exploding deadlines.

A lot of firms do it. Happens early - mid August

 

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------------ I'm making it up as I go along.
 

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