Tag Archives: corporate recruiting folklore

Explain Investment Banking to a Child

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Title: Explain Investment Banking to a Child

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal Folklore, Horror Story
  • English
  • Country where Item is from: US

Informant Data:

  • Josh Alexakos is a Dartmouth senior government major from the outskirts of Boston, MA. His father is a banker and his mother, an anesthesiologist. He is involved on campus in the Christian Union, DREAM, club basketball, and his fraternity. After graduation, he is looking to go into finance. He became involved in the corporate recruiting process during his Sophomore Summer when he saw his friends “stressing out” over applying and felt the need to participate as well.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: Corporate recruiting has a stress-interview component, where candidates are expected to respond to difficult questions under stressful conditions to test how well people stand up to high-pressure environments. How these stressful conditions are created varies from interview to interview.

Item:

  • Josh heard this story from a friend, who was asked in an investment banking interview how he would explain investment banking to a five year old. The friend proceeded to answer the question, and once finished, asked the interviewer how he did with his explanation, only to be told that the response was not effective at all and actually made investment banking harder to understand for the interviewer, never-mind a five year old.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

  • “I had a friend who was in an investment banking interview how… by the interviewer, how he would explain investment banking to a five year old, which is kind of a rough question to be in. And he explained it in a way, probably about toys, and about merging toys… and afterwards, he asked, ‘does that make sense?’ And the interviewer said ‘no, that makes less sense. I understand investment banking less now.'”

Informant’s Comments:

  • Hearing this story from his friend made Josh more nervous about the interview, because he thought that if he had received a response like that, “I might have just cried, or like run out of the room because that is just not a fun reaction to get.” Thus, the tale made him prepare more for stress interviews afterwards to overcome his nervousness.

Collector’s Comments:

  • Josh’s reaction to hearing this story serves as an illustrative example of how corporate recruiting horror stories function. After initially wincing and laughing along to the story, Josh took the tale as a word of advice and prepared more for such stressful situations in interviews afterwards than he otherwise would have.

Collector’s Name: Aime Joo

Tags/Keywords:

  • Corporate Recruiting Folklore, Verbal Folklore, Horror Stories, Investment Banking

Leaning Tower of Pisa Brainteaser

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Title: Leaning Tower of Pisa Brainteaser

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal Folklore, Riddles
  • English
  • Country where Item is from: US

Informant Data:

  • Thomas Ware is a Dartmouth Senior from Wisconsin and a government major, involved in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and IM sports. His father is a Dartmouth alumni who currently works at a company that does credit scores for smaller companies. After graduation, he will be working for a consulting firm in Boston, a position he got by undergoing corporate recruiting. Thomas got involved in corporate recruiting during Sophomore Summer when he went along to a few events and information sessions with his fraternity brothers.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: During the second part of corporate recruiting interviews, candidates are often asked difficult questions (brainteasers) to evaluate how they approach problems and how they logically solve unexpected tasks. Because much of consulting revolves around problem-solving and working under pressure, brainteasers are aimed at testing these skills.

Item:

  • Thomas received this question during a consulting firm interview: “how many donuts fit in the Leaning Tower of Pisa?”

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

  • “I was given and I practiced this brainteaser — How many donuts fit in the Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

Informant’s Comments:

  • Thomas commented that for brain teasers, the questions were never really about how close you got to the actual answer, but how you broke down and approached the problem because interviewers were more interested in the thinking process and the logical approach rather than how close an estimate was.

Collector’s Comments:

  • Like riddles, corporate recruiting brain teasers serve the purpose of testing the wit of the interviewee and also forces the candidates to push cognitive boundaries of what is considered “normal knowledge” to best answer the question. Although they lack the metaphorical component of true riddles, the cognitive and testing purpose these brain teasers serve are similar.

Collector’s Name: Aime Joo

Tags/Keywords:

  • Corporate recruiting folklore, Verbal folklore, Brainteasers, Leaning Tower of Pisa

Two-Faced Interviewer

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Title: Two-Faced Interviewer

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal Folklore
  • English
  • Country where Item is from: US

Informant Data:

  • Andrew Wolff is a junior at Dartmouth College and a Quantatative Social Science major from New Jersey. His mother is a  college advisor and his father a sales representative for medical journals. He is a brother in the Alpha Chi fraternity, is involved in TAMID, a Dartmouth consulting group for Israeli start-ups, and organized the Dartmouth Model UN Conference. He is currently planning on joining a consulting firm after graduation, and became involved in corporate recruiting during his Sophmore Summer after hearing about it from his brothers at Alpha Chi.

Contextual Data: 

  • Cultural Context: Corporate recruiting has a stress-interview component, where candidates are expected to respond to difficult questions under stressful conditions to test how well people stand up to high-pressure environments. How these stressful conditions are created varies from interview to interview.

Item:

  • This was a personal horror story that Andrew later shared with his fraternity brothers after the experience. In a first-round interview, the interviewer approached the candidates and seemed very kind and nice, but the minute the interview started, he did a complete about-face and became very argumentative and combative, picking apart every answer that Andrew gave. As a result of the bad interview experience, after the interview was over, Andrew reworked his company preference order to remove that company from his top position, only to find out later by the same inteviewer that Andrew did very well in the interview and would have been given the job if the priority order had been left alone.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

  • “In a first round, there was a guy who was really nice when he first walked in, and then we start the interview and he just got like really really mean, just like challenging everything I said, like making it seem like I wasn’t communicating my ideas effectively, like ‘I’m asking you about a time when you were challenged by a different opinion and you keep skipping over the difficult parts. I need you to go back and outline, you’re not giving me what we’re looking for.’ And during the case, he was really combative with my answers, he would just be like after everything I say, just be like ‘so, is that all? are you sure that’s what you want to do?’ And then as soon as the case was over, he just like switched again into this nice dude, and he actually rattled me enough that I, um, and I knew which office he was from that after that interview, and my second round interview, which went… my second first round interview, which went a lot better I switched the preferences of my office. But it turned out that the guy was the one who actually called me to give me the final round, and told me that he was sorry that I switched my preferences because you did a great job, and I was like you could have been a little bit nicer.”

Informant’s Comments:

  • This is one of Andrew’s main horror stories he shares with other people going through the corporate recruiting process.

Collector’s Comments:

  • The stress interview itself may not be folklore, since it is a formalized part of the actual interview process, but in Andrew’s telling this personal experience repeatedly to other people as both a funny horror story and a word of caution against too readily reacting to what you think was a bad interview, it becomes a part of the verbal folklore surrounding corporate recruiting.

Collector’s Name: Aime Joo

Tags/Keywords:

  • Corporate Recruiting Folklore, Stress Interviews, Verbal Folklore, Horror Stories

Orange Bottomed Shoes

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Title: Orange Bottomed Shoes

General Information about Item:

  • Customary and Material Folklore
  • English
  • Country where Item is from: US

Informant Data:

  • Andrew Wolff is a junior at Dartmouth College and a Quantatative Social Science major from New Jersey. His mother is a  college advisor and his father a sales representative for medical journals. He is a brother in the Alpha Chi fraternity, is involved in TAMID, a Dartmouth consulting group for Israeli start-ups, and organized the Dartmouth Model UN Conference. He is currently planning on joining a consulting firm after graduation, and became involved in corporate recruiting during his Sophmore Summer after hearing about it from his brothers at Alpha Chi.

Contextual Data:

  • Social/Cultural Context: Interviewees at corporate recruiting interviews wear business casual attire as an unspoken but widely understood rule, and there is a wide-spread belief that certain clothes help candidates’ chances to make a good impression.

Item:

  • Andrew has a pair of orange-bottomed Cole Hahn shoes that he wears to all important occasions, such as his corporate recruiting interview, because their bright colored soles draw attention to himself and makes a memorable impression to the interviewers. Against the generally limited array of men’s business wear, the orange coloring is enough to make him stand out without being inappropriate.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

  • “I wore a shirt and a tie that was the only ones that I brought with me for the summer for my first round interviews, and then for my final round ones I borrowed other ones because I didn’t want to look like I only owned that one shirt and tie. But, no, we don’t really have any clothes that we share as a house for interviewing and the CPD doesn’t have anything, but I’m a pretty big believer that, uh, that like male formal dress style, that you can distinguish yourself with really subtle things, so like wearing shoes that are a little-bit out of the norm, or like a belt that really pops, or cufflinks or something like that can really make a difference, if someone remembers something about how you were dressed, they’ll remember how you were standing, and also how you carried yourself. Um, so I have these sort of, these like, I don’t know quite how to describe them, but they’re Cole Hahn shoes that have this like really dark orange undersole that are fairly controversial with people, but that I really really like and I wear them to any kind of interview or event where I’m wearing a suit that I want people to remember something about me. So when I walked into my final rounds, for the most part they were like I really like you shoes, so I was like ‘yes.'”

Collector’s Comments:

  • This superstition falls into both material and customary folklore. As a superstition, it follows the magic superstition formula of if I do A, then B will result, in this case working as if I wear the orange shoes, then I will be more memorable as a candidate. Yet it also deals with the material folklore of clothing that surrounds corporate recruiting, since there is an unspoken understanding that candidates need  to wear business-attire and that there is a “controversial” lines that the shoes push against.

Collector’s Name: Aime Joo

Tags/Keywords:

  • Material Folklore, Customary Folklore, Corporate Recruiting Folklore