Goldman Sachs Gets A Quarter Million Summer Job Applicants
By Tyler Durden
Following recent stumbles within the global banking sector, not only on the litigation front where banks have paid over a quarter trillion in legal fees and settlements in the past several years, but also due to tumbling profits and more recently, compensation and staffing cuts, many speculated that recent generations of college and MBA grads would pick other career options over Wall Street. They were wrong.
According to the FT, Goldman Sachs attracted more than a quarter of a million applications from students and graduates for jobs this summer, “suggesting fears of a ‘brain drain’ in the sector may be exaggerated as banks introduce more employee-friendly policies.” The number of applications from students and graduates globally have risen more than 40% since 2012, the paper adds. This means there is greater demand to get a job at Goldman than there is even in China where recently 1.2 million job candidates applied for 19,000 much-desired govermment positions.
Needless to say, the numbers show Goldman Sachs is attracting far more potential workers and would-be bankers than they could ever employ. It was not immediately clear how many of the 250,000 applicants Goldman – which in recent weeks have been firing bankers for the first time since the crisis – will end up hiring. Goldman’s 2016 applicants include 223,849 undergraduates applying for summer jobs and new analyst positions, as well as 30,542 MBAs looking for summer jobs and new associate positions. Undergraduate applications are up 46 per cent from 2012 while those holding MBAs are up 15 per cent.
The trend is mirrored at several other large banks such as JPMorgan, which said it was hiring only 2% or graduate applicants to its investment banking division, and Citigroup, where the proportion of would-be analysts and associates hired in its global investment banking division was 2.7% . JPMorgan said it got 40% more graduate applications for investment banking this year than in 2014, but would not give an absolute figure. Morgan Stanley said its North American investment banking division was now attracting about 8,000 applications a year, up from “6,000 plus” in 2006-07. Those candidates are competing for slightly more than 100 spots, the same number as in 2006-07.
Elsewhere, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said it only offered jobs to 3% of its investment banking applicants — and that 90 per cent of those offered jobs accept them. Even chronic criminal recidivist Deutsche Bank said its investment bank had a 14% increase in intern applications across the globe this year, and hired 9 per cent more interns than a year ago.
Other banks also say they are seeing higher application levels and improved retention rates despite the battering the industry’s reputation has taken for everything from long hours to causing a crisis that inflicted poverty on a generation. In fact, the worse the global banking industry appears to be, the more job applicants it seems to get.
“The idea that suddenly people don’t want to go into banking — or if they do …read more
Source: Goldman Sachs Gets A Quarter Million Summer Job Applicants
