NEW YORK
Students looking for jobs on Wall Street may find fewer opportunities when investment banks’ recruiting teams visit campuses this fall.
The gloom and doom in credit markets doesn’t seem to have dulled firms’ interest in finding new talent. But the uncertainty may have led more summer associates to accept full-time offers at such companies as Citigroup Inc., leaving a shrinking number of available positions. After the heated competition for candidates in recent years, the environment now favors employers, not students.
“It’s a reversal of what happened last year, when students were saying, ‘The world is my oyster,'” said Caitlin McLaughlin, head of campus recruiting at Citigroup.
Citigroup has seen a higher number of summer interns accepting full-time offers. Typically, the acceptance rate is 50 percent to 60 percent, but this year it’s in the range of 80 percent to 90 percent, changing full-time recruiting dramatically.
“The challenge will be determining our needs, as we have a significantly higher yield this year than in prior years,” said McLaughlin. The company said hiring across its markets and banking business is similar to last year, when it hired about 450 employees in the division.
The University of California-Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and other schools also noticed this change on both the undergraduate and MBA levels.
