captain for two years and today I'll be sharing some insider recruiting secrets

Hopefully no one from JP Morgan sees this. Anyway what's up everyone my name

is Ben I'm a former JP Morgan investment banking

analyst and welcome back to rareliquid the best channel for tech investing

As a friendly reminder, I'm gonna be doing my best to post three videos a

week and on the weekends they're gonna be career-related videos and on the

weekdays they're gonna be related to stock investing and crypto investing

Alright so today's agenda looks like this. First I'll be providing some info

about my role as recruiting captain I'll then share an inside view of the

process, what bankers look for, and lastly some

uncommon recruiting tips. Also if you're interested in getting career or

recruiting advice from me then I'm starting something called YouTube

Memberships I'll leave a link to it in the

description and in the comments down below

I'm still working on the pricing and what exactly I'm going to offer but by

the time this video posts, all of the information will be there if

you click the link. What I do know though is that I'm going to be creating a

separate Discord just for rareliquid careers,

and this is something that's going to be for paid members only and totally

separate from my Patreon and investing Discord that I have

Alright so first up let me briefly talk about my role as recruiting captain

I worked at JP Morgan from 2015 to 2018 and in my first year I was just

a normal member of the recruiting team which really just meant helping review

resumes, doing some coffee chats, and holding some first round interviews

I really enjoyed helping out on the recruiting team so in my second year I

became a co-captain of the jpmorgan uc berkeley recruiting team and then in

my third year I became the sole captain As a recruiting captain I managed a team

of five other analysts and we were really the core recruiting team-

we did have additional help from other UC Berkeley alumni

but we were really the main ones running all of UC Berkeley

JP Morgan recruiting for all of the offices across the United States

the last thing I want to mention is that just because I was a recruiting captain

doesn't mean that I was calling all the shots- I was still coordinating with a

lot of higher level VPs and directors and they were also

helping out with the process it's just that I was kind of the point

guard or point person running the entire recruiting process. One thing I

want to add is that it's not like an amazing feat

being a recruiting captain even though you're just an analyst and

that's because most bankers just don't want additional work on their plates

because they're so busy already I just personally happen to really enjoy

helping out with the recruiting process and

since I was involved a lot in my first year, whenever

HR reached out to me about recruiting stuff I just kept

you know being in contact with them and I kind of just naturally became the

captain during my time there. Okay so now you

know about my role let me provide you with an inside look

into the recruiting process for banking. Now a lot of things have

changed in banking recruiting even since the

time that I have left so I'm gonna be first starting off with how

things used to be done when I was there because that's kind of just what I know

best and then I'll explain a little bit more

about how things have changed But one thing that probably has not

changed is that most recruiting teams are structured based on school

so at JP Morgan there was a recruiting team for UC Berkeley one for USC,

Stanford, Harvard and etc Okay so now going a little bit into how

things used to be done let me first go into the entire process

the first thing that happens is that usually we set up an info session on

campus where we just invite a lot of the

bankers whether they went to UC Berkeley or not whoever from the

office nearby was was just willing to attend they would just all come and talk

to students about JP Morgan and investment banking

We would have an application deadline for everyone to send in their resumes

and we would also reach out to all of the

major business organizations on campus at UC Berkeley

and they would send us their resume books as well. So that's why it was also

very important for as a student interested in

banking at UC Berkeley at least to be part of business organizations on

campus. Usually we would get around 150 to 200 applications per cycle

and what we would do is we literally just get into a room with about

five or six of us, the core recruiting team, and we would

just go through each resume and look at it for around 30 seconds and

rate it from a scale of one through ten or one through five

and after I'm looking at all of the resumes, there usually would be kind of a

natural cutoff point where we would find something like the top 40

resumes and those are the people we would invite to first round interviews

or digital interviews We didn't have digital interviews back

then, so at least what we used to do is split up those 40 candidates

amongst the different UC Berkeley alumni that are at JP Morgan for first round

interviews and we tried to have at least two to

three touch points with each candidate that we kind of liked whether

it was through an actual phone call interview or through a coffee

chat. Each person would usually send me feedback via email and I would include

it in a tracker that I had with the top 40 candidates and

in that tracker I would have things like their name, their GPA,

what we ranked their resume, and we would have information about who talked to

them and what kind of notes that the interviewer provided and

naturally what would happen is that around 10 to 15 of the strongest

candidates would just kind of rise to the top

So after that first round interview process what we would then do is get in

a room and discuss with the core recruiting team

which five we wanted to send because at least

back then we could only send five candidates out of the 150 to 200

to the San Francisco Superday and then for the New York Superday, we could also

only send five, so around 10 candidates for the two major

offices in the US SF and New York out of the 150 to 200

applicants After thatm pretty much our work was done

All the Superday invitations would be sent out to the

candidates and what that entails is for candidates to either go to the San

Francisco or New York office or whatever office

that they're interviewing at and they would go through around five to

six 30-minute interviews in a row, usually with VPs and above and the

VPs and directors who interviewed them they would be the ones

making the final call as to who would be chosen

to get the offer. Sorry I meant offers not just one offer, usually

if we sent around 10 candidates or so ideally we would want at least

six to seven maybe eight get offers but usually it was closer to around five

Next up, let me share a little bit about what I know about how things are being

done now First of all in terms of the recruiting

timeline process, I've heard that a lot of banks are now recruiting for

junior summer internships in sophomore winter, which is just kind of crazy to me

because back then when I was in college, the juniors when I was a freshman were

that were recruiting for banking were recruiting during their junior year

winter the issue with recruiting sophomores during their

winter is that if you think about it, they only really had their freshman year

to build any sort of experience and they maybe might have one summer internship

during their freshman to sophomore year, but besides that they don't really have

that much and you also have to put in a lot of time for

networking, behavioral prep, and technical prep, and it's just really hard to do

that not even two full years into college and

so that's why back then when I was the

recruiting captain, there was a lot of kind of drama amongst the banks going on

because everyone was starting to recruit around March or April and usually

even though I mentioned earlier that recruiting happened junior year winter,

at least when I was actually the recruiting captain recruiting was

starting to happen junior year in the fall and that's when

pretty much all the banks were doing it and then suddenly some banks started to

do it in the spring of sophomore year for candidates and then everyone just

wanted to be ahead of each other and get the best candidates and so things just

kept being pushed earlier and earlier I actually remember having some pretty

intense discussions with HR trying to convince them basically that

we needed to move faster with our recruiting timelines because

so many banks were recruiting in April and May back in

even in 2016, and we were finishing our recruiting process that year

in September, October and it bled a little bit into november as well which

you know was just kind of bad for us because a lot of the top candidates were

really gone by then What has also changed a lot is digital

interviews also called higher views and this has replaced a lot of first

round interviews for a lot of banks When I was at JP Morgan during my last

recruiting cycle we did have digital interviews it was the first time we were

really doing it and we also combined it with first round

interview phone calls, I don't know actually if a lot of banks are doing

that now later on in the future I do plan to make another

kind of like insider secrets of how the recruiting process for banking u

with more information that I gained from some of my

banking friends that are still in banking and so later on I'll have some

updated information about you know what the whole entire recruiting process is

like, but basically what you need to know is that digital interviews

are just interviews where you're asked a few questions and you record on your

laptop camera your answers to them, and a lot of the bankers will just kind

of review a ton of them so something like 10 to 20

in a row and just mark them up and send it back

to the recruiting team Next up, let me discuss what we typically

looked for in candidates Now all of banking really boils down to

three main things which is your resume, networking, and interview skills. Now when

we go through the resume I would say the first thing that we look at is just the

education section and the gpa, and I would say that the gpa is probably

around forty percent weight of importance and

there are three natural cutoff points At JP Morgan 3.3 was the cut off if your

GPA was below that, honestly we would just kind of not look

at the resume at all unless it had just crazy amazing experience and even then

it would be a little bit iffy 3.5 is the level where we say okay this

is an acceptable GPA and a 3.7 or above typically anything above that

we would say okay this person checks off the box for GPA

Now in terms of majors we did want to see something like business or econ, but

if you had something like math or cs all of that was also totally fine

and if you did major in something harder but had a really low GPA,

sorry but it would just not it wouldn't really help you to have a low GPA and a

hard major it was probably actually better if you had an easier major and a

higher GPA The second thing we looked at is

professional experience and we would probably weight this

around 50 percent of importance. What we typically looked for

are either big brand names or also just some professional experience where you

have worked in some kind of finance related role. Usually the best candidates

had around two to three experiences of working in some kind of

finance role either through a boutique investment bank or private equity firm,

or maybe a finance position at some kind of tech company in San Francisco or

something like that The reason professional experience is so

important and besides kind of the obvious of just that

you know previous work that you have done is a good

indicator of what kind of work you'll be interested in the future

but the additional kind of layer of nuance is the

is that as an investment banker you're going to be working 80 to 100 hours a

week right so we want to be sure that we're hiring

candidates who know that this is the kind of lifestyle that

they're going to be signing up for and they know what they're getting

themselves into because the last thing we want to do

is hire someone who didn't understand what kind of lifestyle banking had

and you know just quit after a few months. The last thing we would look at

is leadership and extracurriculars and those would be about 10%

of importance and you know if you were a leader of a club or something like that

or a sports team then it would be a plus, but it wouldn't be

kind of what overshadows everything else on the

resume, so that's how we generally looked at

that section of the resume Now once you are selected for interviews