If you’re a student looking for a banking job and are feeling beaten down by your inability to find one, you can take some solace from the fact that you’re not alone. The well-connected offspring of managing directors who’ve spent decades working in the banking industry are struggling to find jobs too.
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Quentin Nason, a former Deutsche Bank equity capital markets managing director and ex-partner at a mid-market private equity fund in the UK, has a son who would like to work in finance. Nason tells us that his son made 150 job applications and achieved one job offer. The recruitment process for getting junior banking jobs has become tortuous, says Nason: it’s a “meat grinder.”
For all the complaints of nepotism in financial services, Nason’s son isn’t the person to discover a parents’ unexpected impotence in helping land a first job. Nason posted about his son’s experience on LinkedIn. Other senior people from Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, UBS and HSBC, said their children are all experiencing the same.
“My DMS have lit up from other people in banking on this,” says Nason. “Everyone’s saying the exact same thing. That there are really clever students, from good universities, with first class degrees and a parent who worked in finance and they can’t even get a position. It’s a universal thing.”
The acceptance rate for banking jobs has plummeted to below 1% in recent years as applicant numbers have swollen and banks have reduced hiring. At Goldman Sachs, for example, 315,000 people applied for 2,700 entry-level jobs in 2024. This year, 360,000 people applied for 2,600.
It’s a problem of both “remunerator and denominator” says Nason. On one hand, students in the UK are targeting highly paid jobs because they now graduate with £50k ($66k) of debt, and they can use AI to send out hundreds of applications. On the other, banks are hiring fewer people as they prepare for jobs to be done by AI instead. Nason predicts that it’s only going to get harder: “Imagine what it will be like in two years as AI really starts to impact.”
In the past, people with connections were able to inveigle their offspring into the banking recruitment process. Nowadays, Nason says “it makes no difference whether you worked in the industry.” All student applicants face the same automated sifting systems, the same tests and the same Hirevue digital interviews.
The process is brutal. Nason says his son leapt through hoops to get his job offer and attended an assessment day at which half of the applicants were sent home after being unsuccessful.
Nason is vice chair for the London Foundation for Banking and Finance, a charity that aims to advance knowledge about financial services. He says the Foundation works with a lot of A level students who are despairing of ever finding jobs. “We have one business studies student who needs work experience for his course, but who can’t find any,” he says.
What’s the solution? Nason suggests more in-person events. Other former bankers are taking a different approach. Marcus Brown, a former MD at UBS and NatWest in London, says he told his youngest son to “forget the city” and to “focus on small companies in an area he is genuinely interested in,” instead.
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