I am not surprised that a cover letter full of humility and honest self-appraisal has shocked Wall Street HR teams to the point of becoming a featured article on Yahoo.
Yeah, I'm confused as to why this was so shocking to the point where it was circulated and warranted a blog post. I've written equally as innocent "just looking to be around talented folks even if it means.." cover letters to companies I respected. In fact, that's what a lot of the design agencies I've worked for got the most of.
I am even more confused why this is on top of HN receiving so many votes in the past hour.
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.
I suspect that a large chunk of HN's lurkers are thwarted engineers, who got recruited out of college by IBs and are trapped in the world of finance by their bloated compensation packages, now living the carefree life of the programmer vicariously by hanging around here.
Not sure which carefree life of the programmer you're talking about -- do you mean the one where you work at a startup, constantly aware of the risk of showing up to a locked door from mass layoffs, expected to work crazy hours out of devotion and loyalty, loaded with stock options that will likely be worthless, even if the company gets purchased on its way out?
Bingo. I think there's a lot of vicariousness going on all round here. It's a pervasive problem with the internet.
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.
After reading the responses, I'm really glad I'm not in finance. "Hilarious but bold"? "Best cover letter I've ever received"? It's good, but it's not exactly groundbreaking.
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?
No offense, but I think that's a pretty typical (and boring) statement that is probably less true than it is on "main street."
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.
Wait a second... this guy sent a letter to a firm looking for employment and had it along with his personal details paraded around - what looks to be - the industry?
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.
Yeah, if I were looking for an internship, I'd hate to have my cover letter and resume circulated on personal emails where it's sure to be read closely.
Yeah, if I were looking for an internship, I'd hate to have my cover letter and resume circulated on personal emails where it's sure to be read closely.
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?
I suspect that footer got added by the first person who forwarded the email, not by the original sender. Random people sending cover letters don't tend to add crazy confidentiality footers to email; business email systems do that.
serioulsy, what are you talking about ? This kid needed a job (pretty bad i would think) and he wrote a "smart" cover letter with his name/email address. HOw is that information being passed around other members of the company a violation ? I don't know about other countries but in the US, I would think it is normal. I mean u need a job. Do you really think your email address is that critical to hide from other senior members of a company u want to apply to ?
The issue is the author openly admitted to them sending these letters out for laughs when they are from people trying to blow themselves out of proportion.
Always amazes me how HN is full of incredibly intelligent people yet some are so spectacularly void of common sense. Only on HN would the discussion turn to whether or not the kid would be annoyed at an email that's forwarded without someone asking him. Course he wouldn't - they are all lauding him. His email has achieved exactly what it set out to do - it's got him a gig at an investment bank.
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.
Do you care to elaborate? History, to me, suggests quite the opposite; you might argue that it's quite common for people to actually practice the application of a generalized set of pre-packaged criteria to all situations, but the actual patterns of events we can observe indicate that we might all be better off with fewer and fewer people doing so, and more and more developing the native intelligence necessary to evaluate every unique conjunction of circumstance on its own particular merits.
>I wouldn't be surprised if this guy gets at least a call from every bank out there
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.
I'm interested in what you say about extracurricular activities. I can certainly agree that in most cases they are a waste of space "I like music, movies and videogames".
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 filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. We both filter on GPA about the same.
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?
Yeah, I should have been clearer, I mean activities that aren't relevant to the job - working on an open source project would be relevant to me. But you are right that some things could be positives, like a leadership position in an honor society.
"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.
I am in the process of hiring engineers and the last candidate that caught my eye, listed some pretty cool side projects outside of his core area of expertise.
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.
I was with you until the extracirricular comment. I can see how some extracirriculars are irrelevant for an engineering job, but I think that it's important to remember that you're hiring a person, not a machine. For many people, extracirricular activities are one of the best windows into their personality that you're likely to get in the typical job application materials. At their best, they can give you an impression of what makes that candidate tick - what have they prioritized with their time and attention outside of the traditional work/school arenas of life (which often are a lot more prescribed)? What have they done/built of their own volition rather than for an assignment? (perhaps outside of the field of this job)
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.
I've recruited for Google, Facebook and NASA. It just blows my mind that people STILL filter based on school. I got admitted to a bunch of great schools and stayed close to home because my mom was ill. Does this make me not worth hiring? There are millions of people in semi-unique situations that kept them from attending an Ivy League school. I don't get why someone would want to eliminate tons of potentially great people.
Banks and consulting firms are in a somewhat unusual situation. They get 10,000 applicants for ~100 analyst positions, but even after they hire an analyst they're really just rolling the dice to find the ~10 (or whatever) of those that are going to be managing director or partner material. The rest will be pushed out after a certain number of years.
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.
It's a probability thing. For instance, suppose 90% of great people go to great schools. Suppose only 20% of non-great people go to great schools. Suppose only 1% of people are great. (Just making up numbers, as the exact numbers don't matter to illustrate the point. All that matters is that great people have a significant tendency to go to great schools, and that there are a lot more non-great people than great people).
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.
Yeah, same here. Look at it as a blessing though... it means that their competitors can snag great people by not applying such arbitrary filters. Hell, that's probably one reason startups can attract awesome people who didn't get scooped up by Goldman Sachs or whoever.
School is a filter you apply before you take the effort to figure out whether someone is a "good candidate." The uphill battle for people from no-name schools is to give hiring managers an alternative reason to put in that effort.
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 can see that if you were getting dozens or hundreds of applications for a role you'd have to be pretty brutal about who to cut before you even spoke to them.
I've never had that luxury, though. Any job i've been involved with advertising has had trouble attracting many applicants at all.
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.
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.
This is not surprising. Unless I'm way out of touch with modern finance, it would be much more difficult to objectively measure a candidate for a finance position than for an engineering position.
"In my free time, I enjoy huffing paint, freebasing coke, and shooting heroin while driving along Interstate 5 at twice the legal limit. I also enjoy canoeing."
I'd argue your brothers approach is just as valid as yours for either industry. You both hire for "cultural fit", just your ideas of what "culture" is differs.
One of the comments:
"It's funny that all these guys loved the letter, yet didn't realize it's their fault that the letter even had to be written. If only they hadn't been falling for trumped up resumes and bogus cover letters for years."
I think in this and many other industries, people that are otherwise talented and intelligent individuals write these types of "trumped up" resumes only because they know that everyone else is doing it. If they don't also exaggerate the truth and try to talk up their strengths, then they fear being overlooked. It's not necessarily that anyone is being "fooled" by the exaggerated resumes, it just means that everyone sounds the same and it's just a game that both parties are forced to play. It's hard to distinguish on a cover letter whether "led a team of..." means one other person or twenty other people, for instance.
This isn't a good resume because it's blunt, it's good because he describes himself as basically exactly what you would want in an intern.
"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.
That's the other thing that's critical: he's being blunt because he knows that he has just enough to make him actually a fit for the job on paper.
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
It's funny to think that more people don't use this strategy.
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 ?
No, the models are already built. However they need someone to comb through a company's financial records and plug the appropriate numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.
It's a glorified data entry position, but interns will gain knowledge and experience.
Usually doing some sort of number crunching to figure out which deals might make sense, eg. Company A and Company B should merge because of X, Y and Z. Then pass that information to the higher ups (rain makers, big swinging dicks, and what have you) who have the contacts and experience to bring the business in and get the deal done.
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.
"could easily be tweaked slightly for any job/industry."
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.
You're right, I should be more clear. What I meant by that is that there's no clear explicit reason why he's interested in investment banking rather than marketing, consulting, publishing, advertising, whathaveyou.
In my opinion, the best thing this guy shows is competent business writing skills, which is a strong predictor of the ability to learn whatever field an intern will be joining.
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.
He wants to work for a summer in finance (sounds like a trading floor rather than the investment bank), is mastering in accounting and taking the LSAT to go to law school... Sounds focused. I can think of more direct paths into corporate law...
"People are trying to hire him" seems like a bit of a stretch based on the article. I see a lot of "Haha, I might even give him a call," but no, "I want to hire this kid!"
I'm wondering if it's possible to determine the authorship of the letter as well as the identity of several people mentioned, based on the pixel widths of characters in the font used.
Recruiter here. If I knew we got upvotes for posting semi-interesting cover letters I would have a lot more karma :( Read probably 100 better than this in the last year alone.
Odd ones always get the attention of onlookers. The letter is honest and straight forward, which itself is enough to get the attention of the readers.
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)
i'll play the devil's advocate role, not that I really believe what i'll write:
unfortunately we don't rellay know if he's really honest, or just playing a role..
* 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?
His odds were close to zero with a "me too" resume, so he risked it all. A lot of Wall Street companies want Ivy League caliber and a GPA of 3.5+ as a starting point--or to have your case considered.
Now I'd say, his resume will be read and he will be judged on his merits.
