The Technical Interview Guide to Investment Banking, + Website

CHAPTER 1Investment Banking Recruiting

As a first-year analyst at Morgan Stanley, I had volunteered to be part of the NYU recruiting team. The recruiting team consisted of bankers from various levels including the most junior analyst through the senior managing director. In our NYU group, there were several of us first-year analysts (mostly junior) on the team, maybe one or two associates, and a vice president who was in charge of the recruiting process on behalf of the school. The interviewing process for senior undergraduate students for full-time jobs upon graduation would begin in late August or early September. Everyone on the NYU recruiting team at Morgan Stanley would coordinate a day in our schedules to meet and go through all resumes submitted. Every submitted resume was, in fact, sent to us and reviewed. We would have a binder of all submitted resumes and would sift through them one by one as a group. It was during this meeting where we would select candidates we felt were appropriate for a first-round interview. We would hope to get 40 to 50 candidates to interview. In my experience, we narrowed down candidates based on three different categories:

1. Students who had prior bulge bracket internships
2. Students who had M&A and other relevant experience
3. Students who we felt may be good analysts

So let me explain these categories. For category 1, we would automatically select anyone who had previously interned in the investment banking group at a bulge bracket bank. But ...