Advice: Post-MBA associate interview at an EB in NYC

Thanks for tagging me.

I will embed a lengthy comment I made in a previous thread and let it stand on its own merits.

APAE:

I have worked in one of the best of both categories of firms.

Both have their advantages and disadvantages. When people tell you one model is better than the other, a smart listener thinks critically to dig in and assess why the person speaking is saying that. It's inherently subjective.

Exposure I'm using this differently than prior posters did. I mean that a boutique will offer you fewer places to hide. If you are really confident in yourself and want to roll up your sleeves as quickly as possible, the boutique is the place to go. Know that this comes with a less forgiving environment. Any shortcomings you have will be highlighted more quickly, and likewise, any particular strengths will also surface.

Some people love this. Others find it surprising and struggle.

A very smart, hardworking girl I know (father very prominent in the industry, seriously like a front-page name ... had a 760 on her test) came out of a non-HSW M7 school and took a boutique job. She really struggled to adjust to managing everything. She gained 35 lbs. and a lot of her friendships dried up (at least as another person told me).

Another guy I know came out of HBS and went into the legacy BX M&A group. He fucking loved it. He asked for more staffings, got them, managed them all well enough to the point he was still leaving before midnight (that group was not a facetime group at all), and stood out head and shoulders above the rest of the class for taking on more work and getting it done. Well, guess what. He did two years in upper middle market banking (think non-BB big balance sheet bank), then two in lower middle market private equity before school. He was just way more 'banking-savvy' than about any other summer associate could possibly be.

The bulge is going to have a way larger associate class. Every deal you get staffed on will be with different seniors. That's on purpose; the staffer is playing human 'sorting hat' and trying to give everyone a chance to date and figure out who they like to work with.

That means that any small slip you make isn't done in front of the MD and VP who'll work with you on four of the six deals you're on; it's done in front of the MD and VP you're on just one deal with. While theoretically everyone should be forgiving of a new associate learning the ropes and getting the hang of things, unfortunately if someone has to see a lot of you, they may be human and fallible (shocker) and really let that speck of sand ruin their whole impression of you. The flip side of "absence makes the heart grow fonder" is "proximity makes the heart grow angrier".

A bulge will give you more room to hide, so to speak, where you can find seniors who (a) you naturally grok with well enough that you're happy having the majority of your staffings with after everyone sorts themselves by the one-year mark and (b) you have enough of a good track record with where there's no demerits on your scorecard that could affect your performance review or comp at the end of the year.

Variety Some people prefer to see a lot of different things as a way to inform their opinion about where they want to specialize. Others feel that research alone is enough to inform an opinion, and practical experience isn't as necessary.

For the former, a bulge is a fantastic way to learn a lot about a lot. You'll get staffed on a wide range of things: M&A, equity capital raises, debt capital raises, startup financings, divestitures, activism defense, board of directors advisory, a crossborder acquisition with an immediate carve-up ...

For someone who has a concrete idea they want to do sector-focused M&A and that's it, a boutique is pretty attractive because you're going to get a lot of the one flavor you've decided you like.

Type There's a stereotype that boutiques execute and bulges pitch. I find that to be a bit overblown. Yes, it's true overall. Bulges are a volume model, and to procure that volume, you have to shake the trees. It's not like you're 90% pitching and 10% executing relative to a boutique's 80% executing and 20% pitching. The two are more similar than you'd think.

I'd also argue that learning how to pitch well is incredibly important. Most people recruiting out of school fail to really drill into who exactly they'll be working for. I always encourage strong candidates who are facing multiple offers to leverage that to extract a group-specific offer for their summer internship, basing that group preference off of an extensive set of informational interviews after the offer was extended where they can learn how the seniors they'd work for think about winning business.

Breadth Some of the bulges are really good about identifying which people have the necessary ingredients for senior firm management, then rolling them across various products, divisions, and geographies to get them a breadth of experience that will inform their perspective as an eventual Head of X or Global Head of Y.

Some people view that as a whole bunch of unnecessary politics and an unwelcome headache. That logic does hold some water. It's a real pain in the ass to move your wife and kids every three years to London to run EMEA Consumer then Hong Kong to run APAC M&A then back to New York to run Americas Banking. Even worse is when you make all those sacrifices only to lose the seat you'd been soft-promised over some political bullshit that someone managed to pull on you. I have friends who have both benefited and been absolutely screwed by that exact scenario.

///

Overall, I'm trying to illustrate that "interesting" is inherently subjective.

You can read my 'David vs. Goliath' post for some insight on why the boutique model has grown to be so dramatically favored over the bulge for the best candidates at the analyst level. I haven't written one for how they differ at the senior level (VP and up); I'll add that to my docket.

There are clear benefits to both. Which you pick ought to be based on how you grade yourself against a rubric comprising every dimension you can identify the two models differ on.

You're very apt to point out that an experienced associate hire is going to face materially more thorough 'fit' questioning as opposed to a b-school summer associate hire. You win here by explaining both the objective and the subjective truths to your story.

Objectively: you have enjoyed the specialization of focus that your current job has required and feel it's given you some depth of perspective, but as you have watched your b-school classmates' careers unfold, you've realized how meaningful the breadth of their experience is. You are attracted to a role where you can do transactions across a range of deal types, industries, sizes, and products.

(Note that you need to come across convincingly as knowing that boutiques aren't winning deal mandates thanks to the strength of their balance sheet, so staple financing and massive bookrunning aren't on the menu when you mention 'products' in that previous sentence of mine.)

(Come to think of it, you're better off mentioning verticals within the TMT space rather than saying "across industries" ... if you're coming from a FANGA corporate role, they're almost inevitably looking at you for TMT.)

Subjectively: come up with something that is an inherently personal anecdote, e.g. you want X because your uncle explained some aspect of business when you were younger, and you didn't understand it until Y thing happened to you between graduating school and now that unlocked for you a better picture of how banking is the right thing for you to dedicate yourself to for a material period of time. As Sil said, they are going to be eyeing you to gauge how serious your commitment to the firm is.

The point of this subjective thing is that you need to demonstrate some storytelling skills. You want to look like a relatable person (subjective) who knows the raw nuts and bolts of what the job entails (objective). Storytelling is such an integral component to success in all facets of life. In boardrooms it's a particularly effective tool that separates high performers from the herd.

Don't lie and come up with something fabricated. Really do some digging and try to come up with an amusing or engaging personal nugget.

The technicals are really a check-the-box thing at this point in your career. Try to portray yourself as a competent (technicals), committed ("why banking"), compelling (subjective) person.

Following that, you want to appear relatable, reliable, and realistic.

Relatable: show some personality -- interviews are almost always either boring or bad (the candidate is either tightly-wound because of the pressure or very evidently not a fit for the role).

Reliable: work into as many answers as you can examples of how you deliver under pressure, how you are a dependable team member, that you don't drop the ball.

Realistic: demonstrate that you understand fully well what banking is. This is one real hurdle you'll face as an experienced hire with no prior banking roles. Their concern is less that you'll be a flight risk to the buy-side or to a competitor firm, but that you'll tire within two years of the grind and want to bounce back to the (relatively speaking) cushy corporate life you know so well from experience.

Good luck.