As students are getting into the swing of the spring semester, we’re starting to hear more questions around full-time recruiting from 18-month students. While each situation is unique and will benefit from individual attention and a strategy discussion with your career advisor, here are some basic guidelines to keep in mind:
- If you are actively working on securing a summer internship, keep your focus on that for now and review the slides from our Thursday session on 2024 Spring Recruiting Strategies & Trends.
- As always, reach out to your career advisor anytime! We’re excited to engage in this conversation with you based on your specific career goals.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
- Offers for many full-time roles (but not all) typically come in early fall – Sept and October
- Often, companies need to assess who has accepted return offers from summer internships before going out to the general market to hire for full-time Analyst or Associate positions
- For investment banking (IB) specifically: While hiring for IB Analyst roles in the U.S. depends on the firm, market, and business need, it’s most common to see full-time IB Analyst positions open in the summer
- Timelines for investment banking and consulting are fairly structured (see timelines here), but other functions such as quant trading/research, portfolio management, risk management, and private equity/venture capital hire for full-time roles throughout the year and are less structured, so understanding historical practices and growth trends of your target companies will be extremely beneficial
- The best thing you can do for your full-time recruiting prospects is to get a return offer from your internship, even if your goal is to change directions
- Networking is a key component to your full-time recruiting success, and you can start that at anytime
For full-time recruiting, understanding the hiring timeline (if it exists) for the industry you are targeting will be important. Even more helpful will be to understand when your target companies have hired for full-time positions in the past, and for which roles. A helpful place to start is the Career Central company activity, to see which roles have been posted and when. See our Career Central User Guide Dashboard for more help in exploring this resource.
Stay tuned for a follow-up Question of the Week on how to start taking action for full-time recruiting!
