Is no news good news?

You've completed the test and filled in the online application form. How long before you're a) rejected,

or b) invited to interview?

It's immediate rejection, if...

...you fail to meet the academic baseline or flunk the numerical test - but only at some banks. Several US banks set minimum academic standards for graduate and internship applicants, typically a 2.1 and 320 or more UCAS points. Banks that impose minimum standards (they asked us not to name names) may then employ software rejecting substandard candidates automatically: "The first part of the form asks for personal information," says the head of graduate recruitment at one US bank. "If you don't meet our academic criteria you will not be invited to fill in the second part."

Equally, the anonymous head of graduate recruitment says candidates who fail to meet the required standard in the numerical test will be told immediately that their application cannot progress further.

However, not all banks use automatic rejection - even if candidates only have two GCSEs and a City and Guilds in woodwork: "We screen all the academics manually," says a graduate recruiter at one European bank. "It's difficult to do them automatically because of all the different international qualifications."

But you will have to wait to hear if...

...the bank employs a human being rather than a computer to scrutinise applications: with most banks receiving thousands of applications, going through them all can take time.

How long? As much as two months in fact. "You'll get an acknowledgement email straight away and after that you could be on hold for as long as three to four weeks," says the head of graduate recruitment at one major European bank. "In some instances, we may come back to applicants after the first round of interviews. If you apply in September, you may not hear from us until November."

At Goldman Sachs, graduate marketer Quezia Soares says applications are reviewed en masse only after the deadline has passed. Applicants for full-time roles should therefore not expect to hear anything until after 19 October, while applicants for summer internships will need to wait until 28 November, and those for spring programmes can expect to hear from the firm after 31October.

Brian Hood, head of graduate recruitment at Citi, confirms it can take over a month before the bank processes applications: "We try to respond as quickly as we can, but the volume of applications we receive means we are sometimes unable to do so as quickly as we'd like to."

And in the meantime...

...while you're waiting, it's worth checking that any messages banks are sending you re the status of your application are getting through: "Sometimes our automatic emails get put into the junk folder by spam filters," says one graduate recruiter.

You can also harangue the banks' graduate recruiter hotlines: "We won't be able to tell you much over the phone, but we can usually say if your application has been sent to the business for processing," says a US bank recruiter.