Graduate selection step 3: First round interview
Fewer than 15% of applicants will make it this far.
First interviews typically take place in the familiar environs of your university campus. There, you will face a less familiar panel of several interviewers made up of junior people from the business area to which you've applied and people from the human resources (HR) function.
The first round is all about ensuring you're the right kind of person for the bank. All banks have a list of skills/personal characteristics known as "competencies", which they try to identify. These tend to be fairly generic and include team building, communication skills, proactiveness, assertiveness and, of course, leadership skills.
Questions asked at this stage are designed to elicit examples of desired behaviours, such as leadership. Joanne Scott, head of resourcing at Morgan Stanley, says questions are designed to be open-ended. She says responses can cover any subject area, within reason, as long as they are detailed and specific to the candidate. "It's no use talking about leadership in terms of 'we'," she advises.
"You may be interviewed by up to five people," explains Helen Bostock at JP Morgan. Interviewers will also steer the questions according to what you wrote on your application form, says Bostock - so it's a good idea to refresh your memory in advance.
At this stage, recruiters will also make some effort to probe your knowledge of investment banking and your motivation for working for that bank in particular. Brian Hood, head of graduate recruitment at Citigroup, says plenty of candidates respond inadequately: "People tend to be very good at talking about the projects they've been involved in, but they don't always have the right depth of knowledge about the industry or the company to which they've applied."
As well as knowing about the banking industry in general, SallyAnn Birchall, head of graduate recruitment at Deutsche Bank says candidates will need to demonstrate real interest in the area of the bank in which they'd like to work. "You need to know what deals have been going on in the past year and which industry groups are doing well."
