I applied to 1000 finance jobs, to see how easy or not so easy, this job market really is. Most companies are trying to hire right now, so the hypothesis is I would be able to get plenty of interview requests or job offers. I needed a resume that was good, but not amazing. Just something that would be acceptable to most hiring managers in finance, and would allow us to get a solid idea on what the job market looks like. To make things easy, I used my own resume as a template, then made some small adjustments to make it more general. Next we needed a name for me. I went with something that could be male or female, and could be a white or black person. . I also wanted to test the market for a college student vs someone with a bit of experience. So we made 2 versions of the same resume. In one, Dakota is just about to graduate and is looking for his or her first full time job, and in the other Dakota has 3 years of experience as a junior analyst. Finally, I needed a phone number and email address. Got a couple weird looks buying a burner phone from Walmart, but we got it done.
There were a couple of interesting trends that I noticed and kept track of while filling out all of these job applications. First, I was a bit surprised by how often the job application listed the salary for the position I was applying to. In my opinion, it makes perfect sense to show the salary of a position when you are trying to get applicants to apply to it. Doing so will eliminate a lot of headache after the interview process if someone had different expectations on the pay going into it. But I just didn’t expect to see it as often as I did. Of the 1,000 jobs I applied to, 571 of them showed me what the expected salary would be for the position, which I thought was pretty cool. Next, there were far fewer jobs than I expected, offering to let candidates work from home either partially or all of the time. I know in what is now May of 2022 that the pandemic has mostly subsided, but I still expected to see more flexibility from employers given how common working from home has been for the last 2 years. Just 259 of the 1,000 jobs offered a work from home arrangement. Maybe working from home is just more of a tech industry thing, whereas more business in the finance field is done face to face.
If you have an idea of something you want me to cover in depth, please let me know because I take your requests seriously. Will be back with more CFA Exam tips in a couple of weeks so please submit more questions you would like to hear answered. Love you all!
– AJ
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