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GUEST COMMENT: How to cope with counter offers
The counter offer can be a nightmare for everyone concerned: candidates, recruiters and employers. So how should you decide if you should stay or go? The counter offer is reactive If you strip off the emotions and set aside the tangible components of the counter offer, it becomes plain that it is a defensive strategy [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Status anxiety, and how to cure it
There are common assumptions about which motives drive us to seek high status; among them, a longing for money, fame and influence. However, once food and shelter have been secured, the predominant impulse behind our desire to succeed in the social hierarchy may not lie so much with the goods we can accrue, or the [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Lessons I have learned from failed phone interviews
A telephone interview is far higher stakes than you realise. I also include video interviews in this statement. They can be done for a myriad of (good) reasons but they are generally a risky option. Given that you can’t actually read each other’s body language and facial expressions there is plenty of room for things [...]
GUEST COMMENT: You’re better off approaching your goals in a roundabout fashion
Where do you want to be in 10 years’ time? Do you want to be a managing director at a ‘top tier’ bank, bringing home million dollar bonuses? If so, making this your explicit aim may not be the best way of achieving it. For many of the most successful business leaders, the explicit aim [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Investment banking vs management consulting (take II)
I love investment banking, and was a banker in a previous life, so I’m not about to embark on a spree of banker-bashing. I enjoyed and relished every moment of investment banking (I’m not being sarcastic here): the long hours, the tight deadlines, the arrogance, the shallowness, and even the odd maniac director (who obviously [...]
GUEST COMMENT: The not inconsiderable pleasures of schadenfreude
As Goldman Sachs’ ordeal clearly illustrates, hubris can lead to horrible grovelling. Remember this: financial services is a cyclical industry. Things change fast. You may be popular now, but that won’t always be so. As a junior in an M&A team, I saw a stream of my peers move to roles in private equity and [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Interns are irritating
I’m not the biggest fan of the HR function at the best of times (remind me again, how you are going to add value by interviewing my candidate for a complex derivatives structuring role?) but when they start sending round emails about interns, I run for the hills. Interns are extremely irritating. They start being [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Sometimes, it helps to be realistic about your career
Getting a job in an investment bank is like getting a job as an actor. An ageing actor once said to me that in the good old days there were half the applicants and twice the number of jobs. Nowadays, he said, the reverse applies. If you want to make it in acting, you probably [...]
GUEST COMMENT: A very small minority of financial services professionals have a realistic view of their ability
Our research suggests that most financial services professionals either overestimate or underestimate their abilities. Working with a sample of 105 experienced, educated financial services professionals, most of whom held senior positions in banking, we looked at the difference between how these individuals rated their ability to forecast the US-Dollar-Euro-exchange rate, and their actual forecasting success. [...]
GUEST COMMENT: A memo to Mrs Busybody in HR
Dear HR Partner, Head of Leadership & Talent Management, Learning & Development Coordinator or whatever else we’re calling Personnel these days, We in the business have some requests we’d like you to take notice of, please. Firstly, could you possibly provide us with an accurate list of all the people who work for us? If [...]
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