You are at a desk, sweating. Your pencil is not as sharp as it should be, but you have no way to fix that now. You need to sneeze, scratch something, but any movement could make you look suspicious. The thousand dollars your parents spent—or you wish they would have spent—to prepare you for this moment weighs on your conscience. Why is the time frame so short? Why is the font so small? Why can’t you remember the meaning of “lachrymose”? Why does the kid half your age sitting next to you not seem to be having any of these problems? Continue reading →

News sources dubbed the 2012 election “the Moneyball election.” Using aggregative statistical models, newfangled forecasters like Nate Silver upstaged traditional electoral analysts, who, like Billy Beane’s original team of scouts, rely more heavily on experience and intuition. Fact is, in our information age almost nothing remains entirely unquantifiable, and more and more sectors are taking note of the Moneyball strategy: employing data to identify key factors others overlook. Financial HR groups might want to take note. Continue reading →

A November 16 CNBC.com article has an ominous title: “Banks Seen Shrinking for Good as Layoffs Near 160,000.” But embedded in its dismal paragraphs is a slightly happier number: 83,500. Since 2009, the world’s top 29 banks have cut 167,200 jobs—but they have also created 83,500. Many articles forget to mention this side of the story: It is not a straight loss situation. And new hires are much more likely to claim one of those 83,500 seats than those already at a middle-to-high pay grade. Continue reading →

One-click career application: It’s every job-seeker’s dream, every employer’s nightmare. It allows candidates to say, “I applied to 100 jobs today” without a hint of sarcasm, thinking that even a measly 1% return rate will get them an in with someone, somewhere. Continue reading →

Too many applications and not enough personnel keep finance companies from finding the right (wo)man for the job!

Wall Street is a numbers game, and so is its recruitment process. Investment banks receive tens of thousands of resumes a year, plus a few thousand internal referrals, and have a single-digit committee meant to sift through it all—numbers that add up to a lot of applications being dumped in the trash. Continue reading →