Brokerdealer.com blog post made possible through the courtesy of the NYTimes and William Alden and Sydney Ember
Working on Wall Street once conferred a certain prestige, a path to riches and an oh-so-important swagger. The big-name investment banks had top candidates lining up at their recruiting tables and thousands of applicants for the few coveted spots for future broker dealers.
But that image held by future broker dealers has been clouded in recent years by horror stories of weekends spent at the office, frequent all-nighters and seemingly unsympathetic bosses.
Wall Street now finds itself with the public relations challenge of having to woo and retain young talent. As part of the effort, many new hires found out this week that they could be paid roughly 20 percent more than their counterparts were offered last year.
The reason: The top banks, after decades of easily attracting the best and brightest from Ivy League campuses, are now worried about losing their favored status, especially as companies likeGoogle and Facebook can offer similarly high pay combined with luxurious benefits. A rash of cuts, regulatory issues and other problems after the 2008 financial crisis has not helped.
At Goldman Sachs, many interns who got offers this month for jobs when they graduate discovered that their salaries would be $85,000 a year, significantly more than the $70,000 that the current first-year analysts make, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The current class of analysts, as the entry-level bankers are called, who started in July, could get raises too, pending a review at the end of this year.
Larger salaries are not the only thing being dangled in front of the fresh-faced hires. In what amounts to a radical shift in policy, almost all the major banks have instructed analysts to take a few days off a month, on the weekends. In the past, analysts would treat Saturday and Sunday almost like weekdays, working perhaps eight-hour days instead of the 18- or even 20-hour shifts that arecommon during the week.
Many have put up with the grueling schedules and lack of a social life for the chance at advancement to Wall Street jobs paying seven figures. And many in the current intern class are acutely aware that the weak economic recovery has meant that many college graduates are unemployed, working part-time or taking jobs that do not require a degree.
Yet, for those who have the skills and intelligence to make it into Wall Street’s internship programs, other choices are tempting. Among the working graduates of Harvard this year, 31 percent went to finance or consulting jobs, flat from 2013 and a significant drop from the 47 percent of students who did so in 2007, before the financial crisis, according to surveys by The Harvard Crimson newspaper.
Read the rest of the story at NYTimes.com