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I had a recent in-person meeting with an early careers recruitment manager last week (some exciting news and opportunities upcoming hopefully!) and we got talking about what they look for in potential candidates. while having this conversation I immediately thought I needed to share these gems with the community in our newsletter!

So I’m going to go through 3 of the most important things they look for in early career recruitment (read internships, grad schemes and entry-level roles)

1 - Your university name and type of experience don’t matter as much as you think - they want to see the skills you’ve used and developed

Hiring managers know that you won’t have a plethora of corporate work experience at the age of 19/20/21 - what they want to see is what skills you have developed from the experiences you do have and if you have the relevant skills they’re looking for in their specific roles.

For example, if you’re applying for private banking and wealth management roles, it doesn’t matter if you have some sort of finance work experience - they want to see your communication, relationship-building, customer service and analytical skills. These can all be shown in retail roles such as

2 - You have to show the impact and value you’ve added in all your work experiences

Hiring Managers and Recruiters don’t want a prescriptive list of tasks in your work experience section. They want to see the value you added and the impact you had in those roles. How many clients did you help/serve? How much sales were you able to help generate? How did you make tasks/processes more efficient? It could even be talking through how much cash you handled and processed on the till.

The key is to show your impact in your roles and use statistics to display it.

3 - Your extra-curricular activities matter!

The hiring manager mentioned they pay close attention to the content of the extracurricular activities. Firstly, they look at extra-curricular activities to see whether you have the skills they are looking for. For example, they can see communication, resilience and leadership skills in sporting activities in this section. Or if you have a side hustle you can display certain skills like sales, marketing, analytical thinking etc.

Secondly, they look at your interests and passions - this is a good insight to see the person’s interests in the role. Have you joined a relevant society? Have you started your attended networking events? or even started doing the job yourself? (e.g. having your own virtual investment portfolio if you’re applying for investment management roles)

Lastly, they use this to see how well-rounded you are. These companies want well-rounded individuals and a key sign of that is the extracurricular activities they have. Things like playing unique sports, musical instruments, academic awards and extraordinary accomplishments (national and international awards) will intrigue companies and also provide talking points in interviews.

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