Best Response

At my bank it goes like this:

  • Everybody meets up in a conference room right after interviews
  • People go around in a circle force ranking people from 1 to however many people were interviewed that day
  • Generally start with who everyone agrees should be cut
  • Move on to who everyone thinks should get an offer
  • Then discuss those in the middle and debate offer / reject / hold
  • For the middle group if there are certain senior bankers who are like "I absolutely will take that applicant", those people will likely get offers even if some others want to reject them and then that person probably gets placed in their group
  • Generally comes down to 1) do they know what they're getting into 2) do they actually want to do MM banking 3) are they likely to come back 4) all the other standard stuff like academic performance, prior finance exp., etc.
  • But what is one of the most important factors is fit - from both a senior banker and junior banker perspective, people will ask both groups if they would want to work with a certain applicant and sometimes juniors will basically say "fuck no" and if it's that strong of a sentiment the senior guys will defer to that

Edit: To further hit home on the fit part, sometimes you'll have a person that everyone ranks really highly because of academic quals, work exp., performance on technicals, etc., but a huge red flag is if everybody says "should get an offer but not in my group" - that person will just not get an offer even if they were really good on paper.

 

Can you give examples of things candidates have done that resulted in the "fuck no" vote? Especially the ones that were really good on paper

Edit: Does your firm do group specific offers?

 

Location-specific but no group specific offers generally unless it's for off-cycle hires.

As far as rejecting somebody due to fit, it's hard to describe but it's things that just make somebody weird / annoying / unchill which would make it so you don't want them to be the person next to you late in the office past midnight on a regular basis. Can't remember all instances, but some examples I can think of are below:

  • Candidate where every other word (exaggeration, but you get the point) was an SAT vocab word - basically one of those tryhards who use complex words to seem smart. Also came across as being arrogant in general, not chill
  • Candidate who showed almost no emotion throughout and stared at me the entire time while barely blinking, just creepy overall
  • Candidate who just couldn't ever stop talking. Every single answer was a non-ending flurry of words and required me to constantly cut them off to get to the next point. Even if I was taking a quick moment to take notes, it was viewed as an opportunity to just keep rambling on
 

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