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Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

#61

Post by bencpeters »

rm999 wrote: post #3

>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…

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.

Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

#63

Post by notahacker »

eli wrote: post #10

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

Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

#64

Post by sliverstorm »

rm999 wrote: post #3

>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…

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.

Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

#65

Post by loeg »

cometc wrote: post #23
rm999 wrote: post #3

>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…

What kind of extracurriculars would you actually count against someone?

"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."

Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

#66

Post by betelnut »

codegeek wrote: post #36
betelnut wrote: post #28

I wouldn't say it's a great cover letter - it's pretty generic and could easily be tweaked slightly for any job/industry. Also it's sort of sad that he has to debase his university and himself for the lords of finance to consider him.

"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.

Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

#67

Post by goatforce5 »

rayiner wrote: post #41
goatforce5 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. Would an otherwise good candidate be excluded solely for going to some no-name school?

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…

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.

Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

#69

Post by antiterra »

JonnieCache wrote: post #58
recoiledsnake wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

PS Good choice on editing that last line out.

Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him

#70

Post by ryguytilidie »

goatforce5 wrote: post #34
rm999 wrote: post #3

>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…

> I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. Would an otherwise good candidate be excluded solely for going to some no-name school?

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.
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