5 Tips to Branding Yourself & Standing Out in S&T Interviews — Dragonfly HK
Whichever investment bank you choose to apply to, every applicant pool will have very competent people — you’re going to have people that studied at Ivy Leagues or top UK universities with previous investment banking internships and strong language abilities. Then you’re gonna have a few of the best of the best Mainland Chinese students from Tsinghua with 4.0 GPAs and strong technical skills. Although the people you are competing against are all strong, there are definitely ways to stand out because banks don’t just care about academic achievements and work experiences.
1. Know the Position and Firm You Are Applying For
Applying for an internship or position at an investment bank isn’t black and white. How you brand yourself really depends on which role you’re aiming for. Which role are you aiming for within S&T? Do you fit the academic and language requirements for this role? Does this role require specific work experiences?
While every job will have a range of skill sets and personality traits that would be considered ideal, these differ greatly between firms, divisions, and roles within those divisions. For example, the job description of a salesperson, a trader, and a structurer are very different, and hence an ideal candidate for each role would have very different skill sets. If you understand this, you’ll know you don’t necessarily have to be the smartest or the most technical candidate — you just have to know how to highlight your strengths, and tie it back to the role that you’re applying for.
While landing any position within an Investment Bank won’t be easy, and will be highly competitive due to many competent candidates (particularly for bulge bracket banks), the requirements for doing so is not black and white, and so there isn’t one “ideal” profile that everyone should try to emulate.
That’s why it’s very important to have a very thorough understanding of your own profile and the list of roles available at an Investment Bank, so that you can develop your own personal brand that not only emphasizes your strengths, but aligns with the specific role you want. Work smarter, not harder.
2. Know Your CV/Resume
When it comes to investment banking, there is no straightforward list of must-have experiences, and not everyone will have the most relevant ‘investment’ related work experience — while it’s an obvious plus to have a buy-side firm on your CV, it’s not realistic to assume an average person would have buy-side experience as a penultimate year student.
There’s more to it than job titles and firms.
Just because you may not think you have the most relevant work experience, you shouldn’t stop yourself from applying to the position you want the most. More than shiny job titles, what’s more important under the work experience section is the description you choose to put under each point. There’s always a smart way to phrase things to tie it back to the role you are applying for, or to highlight relevant skill sets/ attributes necessary for that role. As such, it is absolutely necessary to identify the must-have attributes for whatever role you are applying for, and when you are drafting your CV, to highlight any tasks that you’ve done in previous internships that would exemplify those attributes.
For example, if you had a consulting internship experience — instead of putting stuff like assisted creation of presentation slides, which you probably did, you might want to highlight tasks revolving industry analysis, or the fact that you listened in on a couple of presentations and gained insights on the client-facing aspect of the job. Whether you are applying to IBD or S&T, you can always make your ‘irrelevant’ experiences ‘more relevant’.
What about extracurriculars?
When it comes to ECAs, this is the part where you can demonstrate your true interest in the markets. Being part of any investment clubs or societies would be a plus — just don’t forget to elaborate on the specifics, i.e. mention the industry that you did a deep dive on, mention the news headline that you produced a report on. This would serve as good conversation starters during the interview stages.
While there is no ‘ideal’ profile you must have when it comes to investment banking, you need to be aware of the stuff that you put on your CV, be smart enough to align in with the roles that are offered, and be ready to articulate those things in an interview setting.
3. Craft Multiple Compelling Stories
To develop your personal brand, you need to be able to tell stories that support that brand. This is one of the best ways to leave a lasting impression with the interviewer if done right. While there are many methods to approach this, a simple one we can recommend is the STAR / SOAR method:
→ Situation (set up the context of the story)
→ Task / Obstacle (your assignment / difficulty you were facing)
→ Action (what did you do about it)
→ Result / Reflection (outcome and what you learned).
Use this structure to organize your thoughts, and your stories will naturally become much more coherent. Make sure you emphasize the result /reflection section — interviewers care most about what your takeaway was rather than the story per-se.
Unfortunately, you can’t just cover the basic character traits like leadership and teamwork because interviewers know you’ve prepped for them. Nowadays, the questions they ask can be fairly specific. For example: Could you tell me about a time where you overcame conflict? How about a time when you had to work with a difficult group member? How about a time where you had a last-minute plan? Or a situation where you went above and beyond what was expected of you? The secret here is to come up with stories that you can consistently use that covers a wide range of character traits. There’s honestly no easy way around this and that’s why we work closely with our mentees at Dragonfly to craft these stories.
4. It’s Not Just About You
While this may sound painstakingly obvious, after months of preparations focusing on researching the right role for you, crafting your CV, preparing for technicals, and branding yourself, many candidates are too eager to simply showcase the results of their preparations without taking the interviewer into consideration.
An interview should be a conversation between two people.
Make the interview more of a two-way conversation. So listen in on whatever the interviewer has to say, and build on it. For example, if your interviewer briefly mentioned that he or she came from Australia, and later on they asked you about your hobbies (e.g. travelling) — you could talk about the time you visited Perth, how the beaches were amazing but you couldn’t understand why shops closed early there… Now that’s your hook to peak the interviewers’ interest, and hopefully it would be the start of an interesting conversation. You need to show interest in the interviewer as a person. Take notes of what he/she mentions in the introduction and ask follow-up questions later.
While interviews are generally a two-way conversation, it’s important to adjust your communication according to the audience. If you’re speaking with a trader who seems less energetic, you might want to keep your answers short and precise rather than being too chatty. If you’re speaking to someone relatively junior from sales, perhaps your responses can be more expressive.
5. Ask Smart Questions
Most interviews will end with the interviewer asking “Do you have any questions for me?” Many candidates think about this question the wrong way: the interviewer is not trying to end the conversation, but instead trying to see whether you have done any preparation beforehand. We strongly recommend candidates to take advantage of this opportunity to showcase your understanding of the business. It’s a way to use that “excess preparation” you did for the interview.
Although you’ve probably heard from people that ‘there are no stupid questions’, there are definitely questions that make you stand out as a candidate. For example, instead of generic questions like ‘Can you tell me more about your work on a day-to-day basis?’, it’s more impressive to ask questions that are more personal to the interviewer, and/or ones that demonstrate your proactivity.
If let’s say you’re interviewing for the Prime Brokerage team, you could ask more specific questions that shows you’ve done extensive research. For example, “I’ve observed a trend of downward fee pressure in the hedge fund industry, where the traditional 2–20 fee structure is no longer an industry standard. I assume this would put a pressure on hedge funds to look for places to cut costs, like their prime brokerage services. What are the implications to the Prime Brokerage team? Is cost-cutting a real issue?”
This shows to the interviewer that you take this interview seriously and that you’re passionate about the role you’re interviewing for. There may not be stupid questions, but there are definitely SMART QUESTIONS.
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Originally published on Oct. 27, 2020.
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