GUEST COMMENT: The day a junior analyst burst into tears during an interview

This happened around five years' ago, so banks may have amended their working practices in the interim, although somehow I doubt it.

I was working as a recruiter placing junior analysts in M&A and private equity roles and I had an interview scheduled with what looked like an exemplary candidate: he had a degree from a leading French grande ecole, and was a top-rated analyst with three years' experience in the number one rated TMT team at a top European investment bank.

The candidate arrived promptly. He was only 25, but was prematurely bald and bespectacled. Even beneath his glasses, I could see the bags under his eyes. Frankly, he looked ten years older.

I started with the preliminaries and asked about his education and work experience. It quickly became apparent that he'd done a lot of pitching. In fact, he'd done an enormous amount of pitching.

The trouble was, there simply wasn't a lot of TMT work around at the time. Even though the candidate was in the top ranked team, he'd therefore worked on no more than two or three live deals. And during that time, he'd pitched for hundreds.

He was interviewing for a position in private equity. I ventured to ask him precisely why he wanted to get out of banking and into PE. This was a bad move.

For a long time, the candidate stared out of the window in silence, tears running down his cheeks. Eventually, he revealed that he'd been working from 8am to 2am every day, including weekends, assembling pitchbooks which ultimately came to nothing. It didn't help that his MD was a notorious slave driver who would review pitchbooks two days before the deadline, and then demand a complete rewrite.

"If you've been working until 2am, aren't you able to come in later the next morning?" I asked.

Apparently not.

He was well paid. After three years, he was earning around 200k (and this was five years' ago), but he wanted out. He wanted to work in private equity or a small boutique where life was more congenial. Ultimately I got him a position in the latter. I never saw him again, but I like to think he got his life back.