ZA
GUEST COMMENT: I asked the CEO to help me move out of the middle office
I’m a recent graduate. I have stellar academic qualifications and am passionate about becoming a trader. Unfortunately, however, I currently reside in the darkest shadows of the middle office. Even worse, I am located in a non-front office building, making it extremely difficult to network, and almost impossible to meet anyone not doing something very [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Six people you will always meet at an off-site
Following our previous article on off-sites , and given that they seem to be on the return and that you are practically certain to be attending one sometime soon, here are six people to look out for: 1. The One Who Doesn’t Want To Be There Usually a relatively senior manager and the one most [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Seven things the new graduates joining banks this summer need to know
I was a newbie in a bank once, so please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m writing this in the context of “things I wish I knew then”… 1) You’re useless One day, with careful nurturing, you might be useful, but until you wise up you are a cost centre. Whatever your job title [...]
GUEST COMMENT: If you think those other interview questions were tough…
Back in the day, JPM derivatives desk was known as being the most aggressive of the bulge banks(it still had the legacy team of Bill Winters tenure at the time). Certainly, for challenging interviews it blew all the other banks I looked at (GS, Deutsche, Merrill, Morgan) out of the water. This was the main [...]
GUEST COMMENT: The next crash will be in the MBA job market
The next big market crash won’t be in sovereign debt or credit default swaps. It will be in the post-MBA job market. The recession has given many people working in finance an excuse to take the plunge and apply for an MBA. The first wave is just graduating into a tough job market, and there [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Why investment banks like their juniors inexperienced.
There’s no issue more sensitive than age. In the UK, and the US age discrimination is illegal, which means banks are unlikely to explicitly ask you how old you are. But this doesn’t mean that they won’t be able to work it out. Most banks will assess your “age” by looking at how much full-time [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Do M&A bankers actually add value?
Earlier this year, Guy Kawasaki, the US venture capitalist, made the following comment to the New York Times: “With investment banking, you make a lot of money, and you get a distorted feeling of how wonderful you are. You’ll be flying around in corporate jets and you’ll be attending board meetings, but you don’t really [...]
GUEST COMMENT: The seven habits of highly incompetent candidates
After eFinancialCareers so controversially and comprehensively highlighted the shortcomings of the recruiter community last week last week, I feel it only fair to point out that candidates are by no means impeccable either. From long years as a financial services recruiter, this – in my experience – is what the many incompetent candidates out there [...]
GUEST COMMENT: The indignity and absurdity of the MBA investment banking internship
When I was an MBA student at Harvard Business School, a story went around about one investment bank that liked to humiliate MBA students working there over the summer by greeting each on arrival with a small folding stool. The student was told to set it up each day in a certain department, rotating every [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Financial services careers are nothing but a ponzi scheme
The headlines are deafening – Goldman Sachs has committed massive fraud, Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan bought Washington Mutual on the cheap because he belongs to a secret cabal of politicians and Wall St bankers, and Stanford and Madoff stole money from old ladies under the regulators’ noses. And yet, every day, juniors at investment banks participate [...]
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