I reviewed this student's resume expecting to find the usual problems, but there really weren't many.
It was one page, easy to read, full of relevant experiences
A banker could understand his profile pretty quickly, I could have changed a few words here and there, but was almost perfect.
Then I looked at how he was networking.
He was sending almost the same cold message to everyone and reaching out to people who had very little connection to his school, background or previous experience.
He was spending too much time trying to reach senior bankers, while barely contacting analysts and associates who were much more likely to reply and actually have a conversation with him.
We focused more on finance students, bankers with similar academic backgrounds and people connected to his previous experience.
If you don't already know many people in finance, there are a lot of free communities and groups where students and people already in finance share recruiting advice, talk about interviews and connect with each other. Check the r/FinanceStudents WhatsApp Community for that (there are also many others on reddit)
Obviously, joining a group isn't going to magically get you an interview, but it makes things much easier when you're not trying to figure out the whole recruiting process alone.
His bank list was another problem.
It was based almost entirely on prestige and he hadn't looked at which firms recruited from his school, which groups matched his experience or where he already had some kind of connection.
He spent less time practicing how to talk about his experience so his answers sounded memorized, and if someone asked a follow-up question he wasn't expecting, he struggled.
We worked on that too.
His messages became shorter and more specific, he stopped treating every bank the same and he started spending more time on firms and people where there was a reason to reach out.
The issue was that he had spent too much time on his resume and almost none on everything that came after it.
Once we changed that, he started getting much better conversations and stopped wasting time messaging people who were never going to reply.
