The randomness and ruthless of getting a trading internship in an investment bank

The text that follows is taken from the anonymous investment banking blog Naked Options. As the original is a little long, this is our heavily summarised version.

"Last year, when it came to hiring summer interns, HR plonked a booklet of 600 CVs on desks willing to take on interns in the middle of the damn trading day and instructed them to select 6 candidates to put forward for interviews (if it's any consolation the same CVs were being circulated to every desk).

Now, if you find you have the time to read through 600 CVs and personal statements during the trading day you should be very concerned that you may be hiring your replacement.

Every single person involved in the process merely flipped open random pages until they had accumulated the necessary six. There was a good chance that many CVs were never even perused and those were the ones that made it past HR.

For graduate hires the competition is no less fierce, outside of a down cycle many offers will have already gone to a previous summer intern (hence the said booklet of CVs that could've sunk the Titanic) so any vacancies still going are treated like gold dust. Averaging out the three hiring seasons I played an active part in, I'd say that for every position that needed to be filled I'd read through somewhere around 30 CVs.

This is NOT the Girl Guides

"When I arrived at the French bank I was interviewing at on time (they were pretty startled that I'd made it at all) they ushered me into an interview with a quant who proceeded to ask me to derive trading strategies that would profit from the suicide bomb attacks on London.

To say I was flabbergasted would be a bit of understatement.

Unsure if he was trying to test my morality or my trading acumen, I stumbled through the question nervously not helped by the fact that halfway through the interview he pulled out his phone and started playing a game on it."

Questions you will be asked

- If you claim to have studied mathematics or physics I will test you on it. More generally, I will try to gauge how much of your course work you actually understand as opposed to just memorized for exams, usually by getting you to explain a concept to me that someone who hasn't studied your subject in detail would probably not know

- If I feel you've memorized off prepared answers to give to me (believe me this is very easy to spot), you're not going to get too far

- I will question you on in order to see if you are serious about your stated hobbies. To me this is a good way to tell if you can be passionate and enthusiastic about something that doesn't have direct monetary rewards - in other words sniffing out the mercenaries. Don't get me wrong, everyone gets into the industry for the money, but in the first few years you're going to go through some rough times and the money you'll be earning will be scant consolation for this. The last thing I want to do is hire someone who will bolt after two years

- It I get the slightest inkling that you're out to fulfill some kind of lifestyle fantasy, that is possibly the worst impression you could have made on me.

- If you say you play poker (lots of people seem to think this is exactly what every trader likes to hear) I will test you on it big time

- Ask me a good question and I'll be impressed, don't be afraid to let it be known that you're interviewing me as much (well almost as much) as I'm interviewing you.

- If you mention that you read this blog I will offer you the job there and then

Ok that last one isn't true.