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bjbj Today, I'm going to be telling you about how you can break into investment banking
if you have a 3.0 GPA, you graduated from an unknown school and you only recently learned
English. Now, as you can imagine, coming from this background, you're really going to need
some kind of ace up your sleeve, to have a chance at breaking in. Whether you're doing
it through cold calling or through setting up informational interviews or through other
means. What I'm going to do to illustrate exactly how to do this and to get in if you're
coming from this type of background, is to go through two case studies from readers and
customers who networked their way into investment banking and got in coming from backgrounds
like this where they were really at a huge disadvantage compared to everyone else. For
the first case study, I'm going to be telling you about a reader who had immigrated to the
US about four years ago. Now, at this time, he was coming from a part in the world where
English language instruction is not common. He only had a very basic knowledge of English
when he first came over. Certainly not anywhere close to the level he needed to actually work
full time in finance or in investment banking. In addition to that handicap, he also went
to an unknown state school, because, again, he had limited financial resources. Especially
when he first moved to the US, and so he really couldn't afford to go to an elite private
school, an Ivy League school or anything like that. On top of all that, he also had basically
no finance experience when he was starting out. He had a few jobs on campus, working
at the library, the athletics department, other local places like that, but nothing
substantial. I'm not even talking about not having investment banking internships. I mean
absolutely no real work experience outside of on-campus type jobs. In his initial networking
strategy to find internships, he tried a couple of different things, but found that most of
what he was doing was just not working that well. The first problem was that his positioning
was not great. He was coming from a unique background that not many other people shared.
And in addition to this, although he didn't have any formal work experience to speak of,
he had been participating in a program that was put on by a bulge bracket investment bank,
one of those financial training workshop-type programs. He thought that since it didn't
last very long, since it wasn't real work experience, he didn't really see the point
of highlighting this. The other thing that didn't work too well is when he started applying,
he focused mostly on applying online, going through bank's websites, going through career
websites, and for good reason. Because at his school, basically no banks recruited there
so he felt that going online was really the only option he had. Finally, after not having
too much success applying online, he decided to start mass cold emailing local boutiques
in his area, and you can probably already guess that using all these strategies did
not lead to much success for him. Because when you don't highlight the key points about
your background, even if you have to stretch and spin them, and when you apply to people
through an impersonal medium like websites or email, it's very difficult to properly
convey your stories, especially if you're coming from a unique background like this.
What did work and what eventually ended up working for him, is when he changed his strategy
as follows. First off, he used proper positioning. I went through his resume and helped him highlight
what was most relevant. Even though the bulge bracket training workshop that he had been
to, even though that was really more like a class than a real internship, with his background,
he really need to highlight that and put it at the top of his resume, make is seem like
the most important, most prominent work experience there. It is stretching the truth, but he
had to do it in this case, because it was the most impressive thing he had. Second,
in the beginning, he focused too much on applying online and going through websites, cold emailing
people, but he got much better results once he actually started cold calling places, as
opposed to just sending out emails. Especially for someone like him with his kind of background,
cold calling is just going to have much better results. Because if you can get across to
someone that you're coming from a nontraditional background and you've overcome so much to
get to where you are, they're going to be much more sympathetic to you. Third, one question
that came up when he was going around networking, even though there were not many alumni from
his school in finance, there were still at least a few. One issue that came up was how
direct should he be when contacting them? Should he try to develop relationships with
them and try to ask about how they got into the industry or should he just ask about opportunities?
Now, at the time, it was about March or April when he was still looking for internships,
so basically well after formal recruiting season had ended. In this situation, it paid
to be a lot more direct with the alumni. In a lot of cases, without even saying too much,
just indicating that he was looking for an internship, a lot of them who were impressed
by his story, just casually made offers to him and said, "Hey, you know, if you want
to work here at some point, if you're interested at some point in the future, just give me
a holler. Contact me and we can work something out." Once he changed this strategy and started
using these tactics instead, he saw a lot more success. OK, so here you see the email,
and you see here in the middle, he kind of starts at a story. He says, "Truth be told,
in the beginning of February, I went to a two-week depression. I thought my dream job
was out of reach because I'm not a [inaudible 00:04:48] target, irrelevant experience, don't
have a strong background in finance evaluations," and his resume was crap, in his own words.
He goes through this and talks about how he got bad grades as well, then he skips to the
conclusion here. He talks about how he has a very well-paid part-time internship that
provides relevant experience, a summer offer at a small tech boutique. Essentially, he
had gotten two internship offers out of his networking efforts here. Which is definitely
unusual, but can be done, especially when you're dealing with smaller firms as he chose
to focus on here. Then he goes through some of the other points here on the networking
tools and understanding the technical side of banking. Up here at the top you see he
got an email from an alum from his school, one of the few who is actually in finance.
And he talks about how he used the templates and tips for cold emails, cold phone calls
and then follow-up conversations that were part of the Networking Ninja Toolkit, and
he says how the alum liked his style, "Good luck and stay in touch." You see right here,
even by using something as simple as just a few of the templates in the Networking Ninja
Toolkit, he managed to get this guy to give him basically a soft offer to come back and
intern with him for awhile. Now, to move to the second case study here. Now, this one
is also from a reader from a severely disadvantaged background. First off, as with our first case
study, he was also going to a non-target state school. Basically, no banks recruited there.
He really didn't have a wide alumni network to tap into. Second, his GPA was also low.
Now, it's not quite the C- level that I had here. He had around a 3.0 GPA. Not terrible,
but usually for investment banking for finance, you need at least a 3.5 GPA to get serious
consideration for most places, so he was at a disadvantage already. To make things even
worse, he had already graduated. He was already out of school. He had been out of school for
a few months and he had started looking for jobs about a month or so after he had graduated.
But he really missed the boat because it's much easier to get jobs and internships when
you're still in school. Now, his initial strategy networking was the following. He sort of had
a wide list of all these different places he wanted to work at. He wasn't really filtering
the list at all, so he had boutiques, bulge brackets, middle market firms, and he was
basically just reaching out to everyone, applying to all sorts of different positions and sort
of just spreading his net really wide, and trying to just get whatever he could. Second,
as with the first case study here, he was also focused on applying online. He went through
a lot of career websites, going through individual bank's websites, and then also as part of
his applying online strategy, he was using Doostang. Now, I get a lot of questions about
this one, which is why I'm bringing it up here. I personally have not used this service
too much before, but he did use the service a lot. He actually applied to around 150 firms
through Doostang, and got essentially zero results from all that. He applied to over
100 firms, to dozens of different places online, and basically got no results. Mostly because
these types of services, Doostang in particular, works well if you go to an Ivy League school,
you have great grades and you're coming from a traditional background. If you're very passionate
about the industry but you're not coming from that type of background, you have a lower
GPA, you're coming from a school that most people haven't heard of, then you're not going
to get good results by going through traditional channels like this. Instead, what he changed
his strategy to do was the following. First, instead of focusing on all sorts of different
firms, he decided to filter his list more and focus strictly on regional boutiques.
So local, small firms in his area that really need help. Second, instead of applying online,
he decided to start cold calling and rather than just targeting anyone he could, rather
than just targeting HR, he decided to go straight for the managing directors instead. I get
a lot of questions on who you should contact when you start cold calling. In his case,
he found that going straight for the MDs was the ideal strategy. And what he found is that
he got around a 50% hit rate with them, so about 50% would kind of try to offload him
to HR and then about 50% would actually take the time to talk to him, hear his story and
then at least consider him, get his resume and then potentially call him back for an
interview. Finally, so this is sort of a tongue-in-cheek comment, but he was using a lot of the calling
scripts and templates from the Networking Ninja Toolkit. Obviously, I'm not being completely
serious here, the smiley face. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because with networking
efforts, a lot of times you get tempted to reinvent the wheel, to come up with your own
approach, do everything totally differently from everyone else. But actually if you have
a template or calling script or certain phrases that work well, and have already worked well
for others who have gotten internship offers and full-time offers by using these exact
templates, then why mess with what works? If they've worked for other people, then you
should probably just go with what works. Now, I'm going to an email he sent me that kind
of describes this whole process so you can see firsthand from him, his own comments,
and how he went from nowhere directly after graduation to ultimately getting internships
and then getting a full-time offer. OK. So here we see the second email I was referring
to, and I have once again deleted his information to protect his privacy here. We see a bit
of background information at the top. "I have purchased both the Modeling Course, Breaking
into Wall Street and the Interview Guide. It has been the sole reason why I've gotten
two summer internship offers from boutique, middle market investment banks." Then you
see here, sort of about his disadvantage background. So non-target university, 3.0 GPA. Then you
see right here, so he started recruiting about two-and-a-half months before he sent me this
email, and he talks about his experience about Doostang right here. He submitted over 150
applications and did not get good feedback from employers and then he realized as I've
pointed out before that really, coming from this type of background, the only way to get
in is to ninja your way in, as he did. He decided to focus on boutique and middle market
banks in his region, compiled a list of banks using the templates in the Networking Ninja
Toolkit and then he got a lot of good feedback from most of the people. Here, he mentions
what I brought up before, how MDs are much harder to reach. But when he does get in touch
with them, 50% of them actually took the time to speak with him. Then you see here he got
offers for two summer internships, one was unpaid but one was paid and he had two backup
plans as a result of this. Now, obviously, I was really happy for him when I saw this
email, to see that he had gotten great results, but I want to ask his permission before I
could actually show this to you. So I wrote to him the other day and here's what he said.
He received a full-time offer about three weeks ago and now he is officially an analyst.
Within a matter of months here, he went from going to a non-target school, having a low
GPA and having already graduated to getting multiple internships and then getting a full-time
offer, and he's currently now working as a full-time investment banking analyst. Hopefully,
now you have an even better understanding of how to network, how to get into investment
banking even if you're coming from a background where you have a low GPA, you go to an unknown
school and you've already graduated. If you follow all the strategies here, what these
two readers actually did, then you'll also be able to start winning interviews and landing
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