CFAvMBA was harsh with his language, but his basic point is not entirely unreasonable.
I hear a lot of people complaining that the dozens of candidates they interview can’t compete with the imaginary candidate in their head. So they go on understaffed and cutting corners to squeeze a 240 hour job into an 80 hour week. because someone wanted to know what to expect regarding work/life balance.
I was called into an interview by a headhunter recently. They told me that I was qualified, but that they were worried that I didn’t have enough experience to compete with the ZERO people they had found in the last 4-5 months of searching, but if I wanted to produce a fully functioning model for them on my own time that was backtested and worked to deliver alpha, they’d be happy to “have me walk them through it” and possibly reconsider me.
One guy said “The problem is that you’re competing with people who’ve done this for 20 years.” And then his boss said “But keep at it, because we can’t find anyone with this particular combination of skills, and the need isn’t going to go away - in fact, it’s growing”. Really? Which is it? Arent’ there all these people doing it for 20 years? And you can’t locate a single one after four months of work???
That’s fine - I understand that they’re just embarrased that they couldn’t find someone to match their dream. The interview actually motivated me to get to work on some of my own research - but the arrogance is really comical.
If they made any of these mistakes I’m sure it’d be a nice long term gig for you Numi, and I hope you charge by the hour because your billables will be off the charts.
Really surprised at the behaviour of some of these ‘top’ candidates.
I don’t know what “crumbled on the first bullet point” actually means, so we just have to take your word for it.
I also don’t know what “sat back in the chair and acted like I should be glad he agreed to be interview” means, other than he rubbed you the wrong way, somehow.
Showing up late for an interview without a good excuse does seem like an obvious no-no. Particularly when you do it twice.
Asking about work/life balance is a legit thing to ask and not a reason in itself to ding people, particularly if you can’t find someone better. Maybe you just offer them less money in exchange, or tell them the truth about the level of work and see if they’re still interested in the job.
“Dinging” people comes from the image of someone ringing a bell and saying “Next!” for next candidate. The idea is that someone is so bad that the next candidate is so obviously going to be a better choice that there’s no point in continuing. “Dinging” people makes no sense if there is no next candidate who is obviously better.
Where CvM sounds like he has a point is that it also looks like you’re too eager to find reasons to ding people, which matches what he sees (and I somewhat agree with) as your history of posts here, that suggest that only people who jump through every hoop perfectly are worthy of consideration, because the world is just that competitive. It’s like there’s a game of “aha, I’ve discovered you’re not absolutely perfect,” and you play it well at other people’s expense.
I’ll agree that people who jump through every hoop perfectly are awesome, when you can find them, but when you can’t find any, sometimes you just have to work with what you can find, do without, or adjust expectations.
But if your job is not attracting quality candidates, perhaps you and your firm are expecting too much. Maybe your job isn’t as awesome an opportunity as you think it is; otherwise you’d be attracting better candidates. That’s certainly what you’d say to job-seekers, why wouldn’t the same apply to employers?
Just because someone went to a top 2 school and got a good job through daddy’s connections doesn’t mean they’re a good candidate to do anything but look pretty and add another Harvard listing to the company’s about us page. Itera should look for people that actually did something rather than someone that checks the boxes of his preferred school and previous shops (this shows when they can’t explain their own resume). But who am I to say, I’m a hacksaw loser.
I especially like how he contemplates sinking down into the pools of heathen to maybe find someone with drive. But when I read this, it makes me think the office would need to be disinfected immediately after the candidate left:
I agree that dry mouth and lip-licking can be signs that someone is trying to relieve anxiety, but I think it’s also important to understand physiological behavior. For me, I tend to have dry lips and like to hydrate furiously (usually I bring my own water, though). If what people in this thread have said about requesting a drink were some universal truth, perhaps nobody would have hired me for anything.
Back to itera’s original question – I think the reason why there are so many lackluster candidates out there is simply because they think they’re good, but they really aren’t. That is the worst kind of situation imaginable – when someone is unconsciously ignorant of their own lack of ability.
I have advised a broad range of clients – nearly 500 in total – in getting front office finance jobs. I help them without discrimination and try to understand their story. I like to think they’re always better off after working with me than they were before. However, the ones that seem to always do best are the ones that come with me about a specific issue that they’re having, realize it’s holding them back, and we focus much of the energy on fixing those problems. Over the course of getting to know them, I’ll also pick up on other things that they should be doing differently, both owing to my experience in screening/hiring candidates as well as some of my own misadventures in my career (or, to be more constructive, “lessons learned”).
It seems that the candidates that have the most balanced and honest assessments of themselves end up doing the best in the job search. And frankly, it isn’t even close. The people that have a real handle on their situation and KNOW they need help without any pretention have a very high hit rate on getting six-figure paying jobs. Often it’s a matter of time but within six months, about 75% of the candidates in this cohort end up getting a front office finance role or similar adjacency like corporate strategy or business development.
I have to believe that some of the candidates that itera has mentioned likely have no idea what they’re doing wrong, which is a shame. However, they also seem so insufferable that few people would be willing to give them the feedback to turn them in the right direction. Hopefully they develop more self-awareness over time.
I’m going to bat for the little guy here. It would kill me to learn some eager L1 candidate fresh out of UConn would read this and be discouraged thinking that he/she doesn’t have a shot.
Itera always seems to throw it out that ‘af poster’ has no shot.
I say nothing ventured, nothing gained. The worst thing that could happen is they try and fail, then guess what, they are in the exact same place Itera said they should be. Otherwise the upside potential is huge to make it against all odds and all adversity.
On average, for every stupid unprepared candidate there is one interviewer somewhere who is a complete idiot. Those are my impressions from having interviewed candidates, and having been interviewed by people over the years. No significant skew in either direction really.
Agreed. I have met a lot of bad interviewers too because they don’t know to tame their biases, or because they just don’t see it as an important part of their day. And frankly, I don’t really blame them. Between trying to do your normal job and figuring out plans with buddies for the weekend, walking the dog, taking care of the kids at night, and whatever the hell else people are thinking about…I can totally understand why carving out 45-60 minutes to meet with some guy you don’t know can be seen as more of a burden than a benefit.
For me, I’ve always taking hiring decisions seriously because I care about the negative implications of recommending someone unfit for the job. But, it also often means I have to make some adjustments in my schedule and do some planning ahead of time to think about what questions I’m going to ask the candidate.
I’m in the camp that a lot of interviewers don’t know what they’re doing and create a lose-lose situation for everybody, but the interviewee will end up sounding like the idiot. The opposite is true when the interviewer loses control, falls for the bullshit artist, and ends up hiring somebody useless.
There is no correlation between being competent at your job as a manager and being able to discern talent looking at a CV or meeting candidates in person for a few hours. It’s mind blowing how many competent candidates get passed by for some arcane reason.
Itera, it’s not my intention to beef witchu, but throw out some positive comments and optimism once in awhile. We gotta give some encouragement to the young bright eyed L1ers discounting their first cash flow. We don’t want to feed the narcassism that is rampant around FiDi.
I’m writing this comment here after I wrote the below to appologize for vomitiing text. I do that a lot.
I agree. As a card carrying member of the “Hacksaw MBA Club”, I fought tooth and nail to get where I’m at, and am clearly the black sheep on the desk if you were to look at backgrounds and credentials.
That being said, to put some perspective into my “water and coffee” comment which I can see being taken as a vulgar display of power and being full of myself. Realize I said “When we go outside using an internal referral”. We have filled ~20 new positions at my HF since I was hired. All but two were from internal referrals. (Yes, the unfortunate truth is most of the “sexy” buy-side jobs are who you know. Hell… not most of, I’d say almost all of them.) The two jobs that weren’t internal referrals, one was from a recruiter, and the other was from a posting we put on a job board… Let me tell you what happens when a HF puts a posting on a job board (I’ve seen us do it twice)
Both times we received between 300-400 resumes in the first 2 days and have to take the posting down. Even though we don’t mention we are a HF, people can read between the lines about the requirements of the role and the products we trade and sniff out that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill job opportunity. We then take this REAM of paper our Admin hands us and group it into three groups: 1. PhD’s 2. MS’s and 3. Everyone Else. Then we go through each pile and separate top schools from the rest. We then give a more in depth look in the following order:
Top PhDs > Other PhDs / Top MS > Other MS / Top School Undergrad > No Name Undergrad.
Starting with Top PhDs we then look at work experience as compared to the role, other perks (CFA, etc…) and identify candidates we want to call for an interview. After The Top PhDs we look at Other PhDs and Top MSs… and so forth down the list. We stop at about 10-15 candidates. We call and set up first round interviews. Then we go back to the list where we left off and look for another 10-15 or so. We repeat this with the end goal to get ~5-10 people to call back for second rounds, 2-3 for third rounds, and 1 to hire.
The first time we did this, we found a candidate before breaking into the “Other MS” pile (role eventually went to an internal referral). The second time, we had to go all the way to “No Name Undergrad” and actually ended up hiring a recent grad from a so-so school who is kicking ass, taking names, and I’m sure making more money right now than most of, if not all the people he graduated with (This is my positivity and hope for all the guys looking to break into finance). He showed spark, drive, intellegence, answered honestly, didn’t try to BS us, and I knew from his first interview we were going to hire him.,
As you can see we had to interview a shit load of people, and I’m not lying when I say I’ve seen so much fluff from candidates on resumes and heard so much BS come out of thier mouths that I am a bit jaded when we go to “general population” to fill a role. Me saying “it’s basically over” if you accept my water or coffee offer is just another way to thin the herd from ~50 people I have to talk to who are basically identical on paper. I don’t want the guy who wants me to take a minute or two to get them a drink 3 seconds after we met… I want the guy who is eager to jump right in and show me what they got. They don’t know I have 10 other guys to meet that day (on TOP of my workload), but it should be assumed I’m pretty damn busy and If you want me to give you 30 mins to an Hour to really talk about what you are looking for and your background rather than just 10-15 mins of going over your resume, you better grab my attention from the get go. Harsh… maybe. But sometimes your haircut is enough for me to get the impression you’re a douche.
Hiring from an internal referral is a totally different animal. Most of the time half the firm already knows the guy / has worked with him/her in the past and it’s basically then a matter of if we are looking for their skillset at that time. If not, we keep them in mind for when they do. They bascailly start at the “Third Round Interview” stage. If they ask for a cappucino, the admin will make it.
Point being: don’t do anything to give someone an excuse to weed you out. If you’re going to get rejected, you want it to be for a legitimate reason, not becasue you were in a lineup with three other “you’s” and you did something out of the ordinary. (Ok… maybe my coffee and water criteria IS a little harsh : ) ) Just do the basics… show up on time, get a haircut, shine your shoes, wear a suit, bring your resume. Follow protocol and then let the content of the interview be what stands out. Trust me, after you leave, the people in the office who didn’t meet with you SAW you in the office and formed an impression. I have actually been asked by a colleague after the candidate left, “So how was Mr. Too-Lazy-To-Shave”
Still agree with the original poster, that the canditate pool is getting worse. I’d say half of the 400 original resumes are just shit to begin with. Spelling mistakes, bad grammar, and no one gives two shits if you play poker. (If he wants to play poker, have him move to Vegas. We trade bonds here mother$%^&&!" … actual quote I heard). We might get another 100 that have no business applying to the level of the posted role. Then ~100 people of various education and backgrounds that can do it. No matter your background, we have about 5 or 6 guys IDENTICAL to you who we are interviewing. The truth is we can be picky, and we are. 400 resumes after 2 days… There’s more out there if we wanted them.
Advice for candidates still looking:
Keep hustling. You never know when that role will turn up (We have hired from job postings).
Network. If you are offered to go out with a counterparty, or coverage, or service provider, GO. (as long as its compliant). The street is small and people remember you. As I said earlier, referrals are HUGE, notably on the buy-side. Join groups, do meet ups, whatever. People remember people, not words on a resume.
