MBB in Europe - London vs Nordic Offices competitiveness?

Hi,

I'm currently an MBA student at a top 2 MBA program in Europe and am targeting MBB full-time. I have already secured a BB IBD Summer Associate role in London to give it a try, but most likely won't accept the full-time offer if given to me.

My questions are the following:

  • I was initially planning to apply to the London MBB offices, but I presume it will be very competitive given the lack of a language barrier so I'd be competing at #2 top MBA in Europe plus some of the M7s?

As such, because I am a Swedish national and fluent in the language, would it be wise for me to rather apply to Stockholm instead of London given that my main goal is to break into MBB?

  • For those who may know the language requirements for European offices, can I apply to Denmark with Swedish? I have seen them mention Scandinavian language as requirement, so Swedish should be ok?

Thanks for your help!

 
Best Response

Can't comment specifically on these countries, but you should consider the ratio of quality applicants to positions. London might still be more competitive, but less than you think so, if you control for the fact that Stockholm office probably hires much fewer people.

Perhaps a way to assess the choices is to determine what are your chances of getting past the resume filter at the locations you mentioned. I would argue that at that stage it's unlikely that standards would diverge across offices very much if at all.

Please consider that after resume filter schooling should not be a proxy for quality of competition. There is no reason you cannot outperform people in an interview just because they come from a more prestigious school/ degree. Human imperfection aside, the interviewer will 99.9% not care about that.

 

I just went through recruiting for Nordic offices of MBB and received offers. The interviewers mentioned that they interview about 8-10% of all applicants and hire 8-10% of those they took in. Knowing others who have applied and interviewed, that sounds about right. I don't know how that compares to the London offices. For MBB, only English is required. I actually met a couple of monolingual English speaking folks working in the Nordic offices.

 

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