Coming Soon: Speaking At Your School (If You’re in the Northeast US) and More

Ok this will be another comments/announcements post, but it won’t involve a trip to China, Singapore, or Korea (I know, I know, disappointing, right?). Let’s jump straight into things…

“Recruiting in a Down Market”: Trip to East Coast with Management Consulted

Kevin from Management Consulted and I will be traveling to the Northeast of the US next week (2nd week of February 2009) through the end of the month to speak at several schools there.

The topic of our presentation will be “Recruiting in a Down Market” – it’s something we’ve covered here a few times before, but with the worsening economy it’s increasingly on everyone’s mind.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss:

• What you can do to enhance your chances of breaking into finance and consulting in a poor economy
• How you should change your recruiting strategy when the economy takes a turn for the worst
• How you can best set yourself apart from everyone else applying to these same opportunities
• Lessons from the last recession and what happened to finance/consulting recruiting back then
• What to do for your “Plan B” if all else fails and you’re still looking for a full-time job or internship

This will be very interactive, with a Q&A at the end. We’re also looking forward to meeting up with many of our customers and readers on this trip.

We do have a few schools booked so far, but we want to do more presentations if there’s interest – ideally, your school will have a good number of students interested in business and will have a club or group that can officially support this event.

Logistics will be way too hard to manage over comments, so please email me if you’re interested and we can coordinate.

We can send a brief description of our speech and our bios so you can distribute them to email lists and whatever other channels you use to market events.

The… 300? Investment Banking Interview Questions You Need to Know

I’m also planning to release the 2nd edition of my interview guide within the next month.

Yes, internship recruiting will be over in most cases – but this will be useful for anyone in fall recruiting next year or for any opportunities at smaller firms that come up throughout the year.

I’ve received some great feedback on the first version, and I’m aware of a few clarifications and corrections that need to be made.

There are a bunch of specific questions I want to add, but at this point I want to know of any major additions or changes you think should be made. Here are a few ideas:

• Sample “good” resumes from candidates with different backgrounds
• More on the “mindset” you need for interviews and what you can do to succeed outside of just answering questions correctly
• Sections on industry/product group-specific questions (e.g. Restructuring)
• Pictures/diagrams (in the technical sections)
• More in-depth technical questions (e.g. private company valuations, different types of mergers/acquisitions, more on LBOs)

This message will also go out to everyone who has purchased the guide, but I’m posting it here as well in case you don’t see it – please send any feedback you have.

Update on Breaking Into Wall Street

I’ve shared early versions of these training courses with some existing customers and feedback has been very positive so far. Some early comments (edited for anonymity of course):

“Thank you so much! I really can’t think you enough for this. These are awesome!”

“OMG, I just called [Name of Company Removed] and asked for a refund! Yours was 1000x better.”

“Can you train me? I need to sharpen my technical skills.” (from a current banker)

I’ll be in a position to release this in the spring this year, but I’m not sure that’s good timing because most people are done with recruiting by then.

I’m thinking a summer release date right before fall recruiting starts may make more sense, but once again I leave it to your feedback – please contact me with what you think would be best in terms of timing, especially if this is something you’re seriously considering.

Everyone reading this site will benefit most from this, so I’ll let you shape the process.

Tags: speaking engagements

Break Into Investment Banking