Kellogg CMC - Int'l Students Info

 

By Olive Darragh, Zolio Founder and CEO

Investment management: an interesting, challenging and potentially extremely rewarding career. Yet, investment management remains a career where senior women are few and much too far between.
It is also a career that attracts many smart, young people. Several large investment firms get 8,000 to 9,000 resumes each year. It’s hard to get your resume noticed, especially if you don’t attend one of a handful of prominent schools; or, if you don’t have a degree in finance or economics. It’s hard to transition into the business if you are a few years out of school and want to make a career change.
On the other side it’s hard for investment firms to know who will turn out to be a successful money manager when young people don’t have track records or extensive investment experience.
So as a woman how can you increase your chance of standing out among all those resumes and excelling when you get that coveted interview? How do you show you’re a good fit for an investment management job? How do you get past the resume screening even if you didn’t go to a handful of prominent schools?
Before I answer those questions here’s why I think we have something valuable to say on this topic. I’ve spent over 20 years in this industry looking at strategy and talent management issues. Thirteen of those years were at McKinsey where I co-founded and then led the investment management practice. For another 6 years, I was at Tudor Investments as the partner responsible for strategy and talent management which meant I spent a great deal of time finding and interviewing top quality portfolio managers.
For the last two years, as we have built Zolio, our new online investment talent identification platform, we have done several consulting projects for leading investment firms on the specific topic of hiring and developing young talent.
Other members of the Zolio team also have extensive experience in assessment and evaluation of portfolio managers. Also, our industry relationships give us access to some of the best thinkers in the market and insight into what firms look for in young investment talent.
So what things will help your resume stand out? Here are two important elements:
Demonstrated passion for the market: You ask any successful portfolio manager what is the most important element of success in investing and trading and very soon he or she gets to a “genuine passion for the market”. The way some managers describe this is that you need to love the competition of the market.
So how do you know if you have a genuine passion for the market? Only you can answer that, but it’s a good sign if you enjoy learning about the markets and spending your time investing, even if it’s on simulated platforms.
Even if you know you have a passion for the markets, how do you demonstrate that on a resume or in an interview? There are many ways: become part of an investment club, trade a simulated portfolio or a small real portfolio if you have the resources. Zolio, our online trading and education platform, adds another dimension to that because you can trade on a real-time pricing platform for 6 months and generate a certified track record. You can put that track record on your resume and Zolio will verify it. Most simulated platforms have pricing delays so there is no way to produce a certified track record. Also, the six month trading time-frame of Zolio shows a real commitment to the markets and the investment industry.
Analytic skill and comfort with numbers: It is no surprise that a comfort with numbers and manipulating them is critical to success in investment management. No matter how good a conceptual thinker you are, if you don’t know how the numbers work you will have a difficult time managing money.
Despite some common misconceptions, you don’t need to be math or economics or finance major to show you can handle numbers. Almost any educational program has a way you can demonstrate your comfort with analytics. For example, even the most qualitative degrees often require you to learn statistics as part of a core research skill. If you can handle a statistics, you can handle numbers. So if you are pursuing a less quantitative degree, look for individual classes that can help you demonstrate and test your analytic skills.
On the Zolio platform, you will not only have the ability to demonstrate a comfort with numbers; you’ll also have the chance to put it into action in your investment strategy.
So, once you get that coveted interview how should you set yourself up for success? The key to success in any interview is to be well-prepared. Learn as much as you can about the firm and the role you are interviewing for. The more you know, the more the interviewer will believe that you are really interested in a career at his or her firm.
Remember knowing an investment firm is not just about how it invests. It is also about the culture and style of that firm. Make sure you know if it’s a team-based firm or one that relies on individual portfolio performance. Does success require you to present effectively to senior colleagues? Do you have to write up your investment thesis for broad dissemination?
Knowing these things allow you to answer the inevitable question of “how do you know you will be a good fit for us?”
Beyond this general interview advice, we have learned from hundreds of actual interviews and from reviewing interview notes from thousands of other investment interviews, that there are investment -specific things that can help you succeed.
We will mention two of those here.

 

The first thing that helps you excel in an investment interview is to have a compelling investment experience you can talk about. Most initial investment management interviews are short – sometimes only 35 minutes. In that limited time, you have to demonstrate that you have learned something about the market.
The best way to do that is have an investment strategy you have developed and tried. That allows you to talk about what type of investor you are, what makes you different and why you think that difference will help you be successful. Are you basing your investing expertise on a deep knowledge of some industry or are you a top-down investor who has invested in learning about macro trends?
An actual investing experience also allows you to talk about what worked and what you learned from those investments that didn’t work. With this experience you can also demonstrate important knowledge of how the markets work such as the relationship between liquidity and position sizing in your portfolio.
The real–time pricing based trading experience of Zolio allows you to do all these things. We have built the Zolio platform to create as realistic a trading experience as possible.
The second important thing you need in an investment interview is to say something interesting about a particular stock or other market security. Many interviewees make the mistake of talking about a heavily covered and much discussed security. You have a much better chance of standing out if you talk about a less well known security. If you’ve done your homework on that security that’s a great start. It’s even better if you can talk about how and why you invested in the security and the impact it had on your portfolio.
You want the interviewer to remember you and remember your passion for the market and the unique way that you expressed that passion.
So whatever investment job you are interested in, we wish you luck. We also hope that you will think about Zolio as a way to help your resume stand out and help you excel in your interviews.

Try Zolio FREE for one month! Visit www.Zolio.com to sign up and reserve your spot. Space is limited!

Via MBA Women International