Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
Is the email really that unique? It seems pretty standard to me and even looks like boilerplate from one of those "how to write a cover letter for internships" articles out there.
PS Good choice on editing that last line out.
I tried to replace the last line with one about how I am partly hanging around here vicariously living the life of a cleverer and more highly paid programmer, but I couldn't make it work so I just got rid of it. Hmmmm.
For tech startups, I feel like this kind of thing is almost required if you want to get anywhere. If I'm reading cover letters, I want to see some personality, and yes, I want you to be honest. Have some fun with it, even. Is that really such a novel concept? Or is my perspective just skewed by the startup world?
Wall Street trading firms have to adhere to some pretty stringent SEC regulations; regulations no other private company has to deal with. That inherently means they're required to disclose more than the average "Main St." company. We all like to cite the bad apples (aka the exceptions), but by in large financial firms are as "by the book" as you can get.
So no, I wouldn't say it's unusual.
How is that not a serious violation of privacy? I'm pretty sure this would violate even the most basic privacy statement. I highly doubt they asked the submitter if they would enjoy being emailed to the industry. In Canada or the EU you'd be violating Government legislation too.
Hope it works out for him, but this just goes to show how little Wall Street thinks of people outside of their own circle. If I were a high up in Morgan Stanley (it's the only company name not blacked out) I'd be pissed.
Exactly, in this specific case it is a net positive! That's plenty of reason to ignore the implications of the underlying behavior.
Would you prefer that I "assume" you might be interested in buying something from my close advisor and pass on your name and address to him as well if you buy something from me?
So basically, the ends justify the means?
That's like suggesting that me giving away your credit card number is okay if you end up buying the product that the third party tries to sell you.
Yes to forwarding resume/cover letter email to others who might seek to hire the applicant. No to sharing others' credit card numbers. Human beings - creatures capable of judgment and discretion - don't need to reduce every decision to predefined deontological criteria.
Actually, I'm pretty sure history suggests that we do.
It's written right at the bottom of the original.
I think that's funny. My brother works in finance, and I work in engineering. We both interview candidates and we were discussing our approaches recently. What struck us is how different our approaches are. A few key differences:
* In general, his approach is based more on intuition, whereas mine is very objective. We both spend a lot of effort determining 'fit', but my technical requirements are far more specific.
* Education matters a lot more to my brother. He has HR throw out resumes that aren't from an ivy or aren't from a top 7 business school. I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. We both filter on GPA about the same.
* He likes it when people put their extracurricular activities on their resume, for me it can't help you but could be a negative.
Basically, my brother wants smart, hard-working, interesting people. I want someone who does a high quality job, doesn't need hand-holding to get up to speed, and is not a jerk to other people in the company. The guy's cover letter wouldn't impress me much, but my brother would probably love it.
Surely though there would be some extracurriculars that might impress you? Contributions to a high profile open source projects , doing something that requires good organisation/people skills or just something that might tell you a bit about the person's personality?
What sort of extracurriculars would you consider to be negative?
I can't see how either of those things is even slightly relevant, at least in isolation. The school someone chooses may reflect a great many factors, and it's entirely possible someone went to Midwest Tennessee State Agricultural and Technical College instead of Harvard, even if they could have been accepted by Harvard. Who knows, maybe they didn't bother applying to Harvard because they thought they couldn't afford it, or the wanted to stay close to home for family reasons, etc.
GPA? Feh... how do you discriminate between the guy with the 3.8 GPA who took Underwater Basket Weaving and other throwaway classes for all his non-major electives, and the guy who took String Theory, Quantum Electrodynamics and Abstract Algebra as electives?
"Snowboarding" would be neutral, whereas my brother says he considers it a positive (we both enjoy snowboarding/skiing). "President of the campus <insert political party here>" would be a negative for me, regardless of the political affiliation. My brother said he could see it as a positive or a negative, probably depending on the affiliation.
Learning of this made me consider: breadth of knowledge, interdisciplinary team structures, and understanding other aspects to design and review, overall - an interesting nerd/geek.
Going to movies, exercising, travel - those should be left off of resumes coming to me. Building electric cars, embedded firmware design, realtime control - those hobbies get me to notice you - especially when they are outside your discipline.
Extracirriculars certainly aren't everything, but to say that they are either only neutral or negative seems to me to be willfully ignoring one of the most important human characteristics of a candidate - and in some cases might prioritize candidates who have followed a lot of directions but rarely become truly passionate about something independently over someone who has devoted significant time and energy to something else.
Would an otherwise good candidate be excluded solely for going to some no-name school?
So what they do is operate on the following principle: not all smart people go to Harvard, but most people who go to Harvard are smart. They're not worried about missing out on candidates that are "worth hiring" because they have many more such candidates than they have open spots. What they want is a practical sorting mechanism that maximizes the number of potential stars in each analyst class.
Then a random candidate from a great school will have a 4.3% chance of being great, whereas a random candidate from a non-great school will only have a 0.13% chance of being great.
If you have a ton of resumes, and only time to examine, say, 1000 of them, pulling at random from a pool that mixes those from great and non-great schools will give you a pile with about 9 great candidates (8 from great schools, 1 from a non-great school).
If you tell HR to filter out the non-great schools, and then look at 1000 resumes from just the great schools, you'll have around 43 great candidates.
That seems to be exactly what this kid did. He knew he wouldn't get past the hiring filter, so he went out of his way to make a contact in real life and then follow up with an eye-catching e-mail.
I've never had that luxury, though. Any job i've been involved with advertising has had trouble attracting many applicants at all.
Citation? That's highly dubious.
There are 111.5M adults in the US between age 22 and 55.
Of those, 64.9% are considered "participating" in the labor force. That brings us to 72.4M. Of those, 61% are considered "blue collar", i.e. manual labor. It's fairly safe to assume McKinsey isn't attracting that subset.
We're now down at 28M. Without further subdivision, I'm fairly comfortable in feeling skeptical that one in every 280 white collar workers in the US applies for a job with McKinsey every year.
"in the US"
There are a lot more people, you know, elsewhere. Further, applicants typically take a scattershot approach, and apply to hundred to thousands of companies in their course of finding employment.
100,000/365 = 273/day. You don't think the most reknowned consultancy in the world can garner that?
Second you assume that only white collar workers will apply to McKinsey.
"I'm looking to pad out my resume for a few months until my dad can score me a cushy job at his firm" is also an honest, blunt thing to say in a cover letter... but I doubt it works as well.
I bet plenty of blunt begging letters from people that don't have an internship from Merrill Lynch or a "near perfect GPA" get even less consideration than the majority of candidates that don't realise their internship and captaincy of the lacrosse team actually doesn't make them stand out from the other candidates from better schools.
"My grades suck as much as my school's reputation but I don't mind toadying to be a really well paid barista" would go in the bin too
He starts with some sort of connection to the email recipient, says how he's willing to do anything, discredits the peacocking majority (and then peacocks himself), etc.
This is the same thought process used in sales and marketing and even pickup.
> Not sure if either of you guys are still looking for a lackey to build models and fetch coffee, but this kid could be worth a conversation
Does "build models" mean what I think it does - actually coming up with the mathematical method that projects risk, return, etc ? And if so, is the author being sarcastic, or do they really consider this to be unimportant work best passed off to an intern ?
It's a glorified data entry position, but interns will gain knowledge and experience.
What is it about people that makes them think a person about to complete a degree and enter a Masters' program, and assumedly old enough to drive, vote, serve in the military, and reproduce, is a "kid"?
George Washington was a major in the Virginia militia at 21. Nat Palmer was the first American to discover Antarctica at 21. Bill Gates was 21 when he founded Micro Soft. Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple.
People who call fully-grown adults "kids" can go stuff themselves.
Also it's sort of sad that he has to debase his university and himself for the lords of finance to consider him.
I disagree. This can work well for an intern position because whatever this guy wrote in the email, is a greaet pitch to be an intern. But if I am looking for a specialist in a particular niche/industry, at best I would be impressed by such email but will not hire him just because he talks straight.
I've heard interns work their way into the big 4 and then squander it - they expect to be in charge of cases, call the shots, and some even refuse to come in when called - "I'm watching a movie."
IB isn't like fashion industry where interns are usually delegated mundane tasks like fetching coffee, but it's good to see this guy willing to doing w/e it takes.
Just today i read one of my colleague's recommendation letter for Masters graduate Program. The letter was full of team player, hard worker bullshit :). (I later suggested her to add in some actual evidence to support her claims)
* what if he hasn't really met the recipient of the mail? (it could be just a way to connect with him, maybe he meets so many kids, he wont remember me)
* what if he hasnt really interned for ML? (will somebody check?)
* are we sure he's really waiting for admission to MSc in Accountancy?
etc..
Now I'd say, his resume will be read and he will be judged on his merits.
No. doubt.