Been trying for a year, CANNOT get an offer

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thefork

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I spent 2 years as an ER associate, then did 2 years in investment consulting with endowments and foundations, and went to a non-profit for the last 2 years b/c I was sick of the instability. I am in my mid 30s. I have been trying to get back into a finance position for a year, have been networking, etc. and just cannot get any offers, been close a few times, but I think my age is seriously working against me for ER Associate roles. I have top 20 MBA, L2 Candidate (just decided to do the CFA to help the resume, passed L1 in December)
Any advice? How long should I keep pursuing a position before it becomes a bit stupid and a waste of time? I never thought I would still be looking for a job a year later. Ready to give up, but don’t want to regret it, but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome?
How much longer would it be sensible to keep pursuing an investment related position, before I should just accept the reality that it isn’t going to happen and move on to something else?
 
I’m in my 6 month of unemployment. Similar age range. Similar credentials. And I could see this unemployment going over a year easily.
With less than three months to go with the Level II exam, I started slowing down the job search pace.
If you already did ER associate Pre-MBA, there’s no way they’ll consider you now unless the economy and ‘industry’ was growing in a real sense. Which neither really is.
I get a lot of these job descriptions constantly emailed to me by bots, and my eyes just glaze over. I’m pretty sure I missed the train at this point. I was much more marketable in my 20’s with nothing but a good undergrad.
I wouldn’t say, give up flat out, but a battle of ‘attrition’ is not the best approach currently.
So many wasted cover letters/resumes or bullsh–t networking opportunities which were detrimental, because I could have been doing more productive things. Over 99% no response rate, more like .0001 response rate.
No silver lining here. All I can say is, be frugal, and try to find other sources of income until there’s an actual valid expansion in the economy.
 
My advice would be to widen your search parameters a bit and either find something outside your current geographic limitations, or try to find non-traditional roles with research components. i.e. credit analyst
 
The only 30 yr-old folks that get hired back as an ER associate usually have years of experience in the industry for that research sector.
So, if you worked at Pfizer or something in product development, you can get into ER for a pharmaceuticals team.
If all you have is just finance experience, you are disadvantaged. shops tend to go for younger, fresher out of school kids. They are much cheaper, don’t have families or tie-downs, and willing to grind it out for longer hours.
 
Nowadays, the market in financial industry is so bad. Therefore, don’t have too much expectation.
 
I keep a spreadsheet of everyone I’m trying to help find jobs in finance. In the 10+ years of experience group, I have 25-30 people on the list. I would estimate that ultimately 2-3 of them will find real jobs, another half will find bs jobs that they’re overqualified and underpaid for, and the other half are completely unemployable in a post-2008 industry.
 
Japan might have had the lost decade (or 2) when it comes to equity and real estate, the developed world has a lost generation. Many people will be unemployed and underemployed. Many people who are ready, willing and able to get promoted will be stuck in jobs because companies don’t expand anymore and people already in place don’t retire.
 
That hurts, former trader. All the more because I agree with you (though I keep trying to find reasons not to come to such a morbid conclusion).
My real conclusion: the world needs large scale depopulation (war, plague, revolution, something). Only then will there be more that matters other than 1) a person’s attractiveness (generally physical, but some other kind of entertainment value can substitute), or 2) their ability to marshal financial capital.
It’s a bit like Woody Allen’s comment on death: “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
It’s a grim prospect (hey Iteracom, you thought I was calling *you* cynical, my own view is disturbingly cynical (the main difference being I try to talk myself out of it)), but I think it’s the only way to avoid degenerating into a kind of feudalism-plus-technology. Because labor is so cheap and substitutable these days. Even having an educated population doesn’t really matter all that much, because you don’t need *that* many educated people (as a percentage of the population) to run things. You just need a few competent managers, a lumpenproletariat or even robots to produce them, and the ability to deploy sufficient capital. On the distribution side, you need someone or something attractive to capture attention in a mass marketplace, but flesh is aplenty everywhere, and again, you don’t need that many attractive people.
It’s only when that system breaks down, when the labor supply is restricted in some way (like war, famine, plague), that you are going to see any kind of improvement in the returns to labor… until then, it’s all rents going to the owners of financial capital and possibly key natural resources, like land, water, and energy.
 
bchadwick wrote:
That hurts, former trader. All the more because I agree with you (though I keep trying to find reasons not to come to such a morbid conclusion).
My real conclusion: the world needs large scale depopulation (war, plague, revolution, something). Only then will there be more that matters other than 1) a person’s attractiveness (generally physical, but some other kind of entertainment value can substitute), or 2) their ability to marshal financial capital.
It’s a bit like Woody Allen’s comment on death: “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
It’s a grim prospect (hey Iteracom, you thought I was calling *you* cynical, my own view is disturbingly cynical (the main difference being I try to talk myself out of it)), but I think it’s the only way to avoid degenerating into a kind of feudalism-plus-technology. Because labor is so cheap and substitutable these days. Even having an educated population doesn’t really matter all that much, because you don’t need *that* many educated people (as a percentage of the population) to run things. You just need a few competent managers, a lumpenproletariat or even robots to produce them, and the ability to deploy sufficient capital. On the distribution side, you need someone or something attractive to capture attention in a mass marketplace, but flesh is aplenty everywhere, and again, you don’t need that many attractive people.
It’s only when that system breaks down, when the labor supply is restricted in some way (like war, famine, plague), that you are going to see any kind of improvement in the returns to labor… until then, it’s all rents going to the owners of financial capital and possibly key natural resources, like land, water, and energy.
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Alrite. Who are you, and what have you done with bchad?
I’m reminded of the Confucian style of teaching where diligent education and studies was supposed to ensure a good career and a path to wealth. That is just not true anymore, and I agree with your comments on too many “educated” people. We need more plumbers and the like. And people need to stop wasting money or worse (borrowing tons of money) getting art history degrees. If you want to learn it, fine, but don’t bank on it landing you a great job, do accounting as well.
Look at Taiwan, it’s a strong Asian country that is widely known for tech and had a great run . I’m told there are people with PhD and master degrees lining up to be garbagemen. The problem is when things get bad and ppl can’t find jobs, they go back to school thinking the next level degree with work. When they graduate, that same group of people still run into the same problem.
 
Massive oversupply of people and degrees with a lack of quality jobs. There’s a shortage of tradesmen but no one wants to do those jobs.
The bottom line is that today’s young people are screwed.
 
Actually, I wrote that and then watched the Charlie Rose interview with Grantham, which is like having a shot of Tequila after you’ve already had too much beer.
The point about smart people is that the traditional answer to the what do we do about jobs question is “improve human capital, so that your labor force becomes flexible.”. But what if that’s not enough? And the kind of retraining that we are really talking about is retraining that takes years to do, not months.
 
Here’s my theory. Our society is doing it to ourselves. We’re addicted to a sense of control and security in an overly legalistic world. Recently, we have developed technology that allows further control of the world around us, particularly in from centralized leadership. Due to the ever present threat of law suits, corporations have harnessed this and limited individuals to clearly defined, monotonous roles… simultaneously eliminating the need for personal leadership and the need to pay people to lead (ie human capital has become very interchangable in these structured roles). I view the macdonalds coffee lawsuit as the turning point in the culture, and also blame the “slippery slope” rationalization that has become so common. The reasoning that one thing must be banned because while it is ok - if a person were then to lack common sense and judgement and do something completley different but somewhat related, then that would be bad - leads society to no longer expect common sense from individuals and to no longer hold them to a standard of good judgement. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it… well, he gets it! I don’t like it any more than you men.
When you read the Warfighting manual (intended for marine officers) you have points it is expressely stated that no technology should ever be implilmeneted and has no role in the marine corp where it limits an officers autonomity to act by reducing his responsibility by overstepping surveilance through the chain of command. I found this dumbfounding, because in an organization known for it’s rigid control (from the outside) you have a completly different picture from within where they truly get leadership and responsibility (in theory). They also go on to elaborate that mistakes when leading will happen, but should be encouraged as leadership entails risk. You never see these concepts in the private sector despite an overall lower level of real risk. And this is what has died with the advent of technology.
 
So the McD coffee decision was the slipping down the slippery slope where slippery slope arguments became too powerful? ;-)
While I think that excessive legalisms designed to protect people without common sense is constraining innovators and sensible people and is bad and overdone, I don’t think that that is really the main reason for our larger problems. Remember that the McDonalds ruling is a case precedent, not a legislation, so it’s not that some legislator woke up and said “what law am I going to write today to have as my legacy” (which does happen, and is a kind of legal sclerosis that societies can go through). It’s the result of adjudications in a market where people have opposing points of view. As you have a wider array of cultures and experiences in society, the rules governing what is expected come into conflict. So you have people who grew up on TV ads saying “call 1-800-ATTORNEY” if you need money… we’ll figure out who to sue in order to get it. And then whatever happens becomes a legal precedent.
By the way, legal precedents aren’t law, they’re just precedents. A new case that is sligthly different may go a different way, based on some other statute that applies, and then the precedent gets diluted. Part of a good lawyer’s job is to find precedents that support what you want, and argue based on statute, eveidence, or other precedents against whatever the opponent wants.
 
Black Swan wrote:
When you read the Warfighting manual (intended for marine officers) you have points it is expressely stated that no technology should ever be implilmeneted and has no role in the marine corp where it limits an officers autonomity to act by reducing his responsibility by overstepping surveilance through the chain of command. I found this dumbfounding, because in an organization known for it’s rigid control (from the outside) you have a completly different picture from within where they truly get leadership and responsibility (in theory). They also go on to elaborate that mistakes when leading will happen, but should be encouraged as leadership entails risk. You never see these concepts in the private sector despite an overall lower level of real risk. And this is what has died with the advent of technology.
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I wasn’t dumbfounded, but I was impressed. However, one does have to keep in mind that the real organization may not behave as much the way the books say it should (like markets).
But I liked the explicit idea that someone who took action, even if it turned out badly was considered better than someone who sat there because they were waiting for orders.
They also said that one could decide to sit and wait pending more information, but that that had to be an active decision to gather specfic information or have some kind of trigger point for action, rather than passively hoping to have more come in.
 
bchadwick wrote:
So the McD coffee decision was the slipping down the slippery slope where slippery slope arguments became too powerful? ;-)
While I think that excessive legalisms designed to protect people without common sense is constraining innovators and sensible people and is bad and overdone, I don’t think that that is really the main reason for our larger problems. Remember that the McDonalds ruling is a case precedent, not a legislation, so it’s not that some legislator woke up and said “what law am I going to write today to have as my legacy” (which does happen, and is a kind of legal sclerosis that societies can go through). It’s the result of adjudications in a market where people have opposing points of view. As you have a wider array of cultures and experiences in society, the rules governing what is expected come into conflict. So you have people who grew up on TV ads saying “call 1-800-ATTORNEY” if you need money… we’ll figure out who to sue in order to get it. And then whatever happens becomes a legal precedent.
By the way, legal precedents aren’t law, they’re just precedents. A new case that is sligthly different may go a different way, based on some other statute that applies, and then the precedent gets diluted. Part of a good lawyer’s job is to find precedents that support what you want, and argue based on statute, eveidence, or other precedents against whatever the opponent wants.
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None of this made any sense. At no point did I claim the Macdonalds case was in any way established by legislature rather than case law. In fact, to the extent that case law is a reflection of the culture, I believe I made that point pretty clear when I established it as a “cultural” turning point. Anyhow, to be honest, I didn’t see any connection between your three paragraph pamphlet on our legal system and what I wrote. And at no point did I argue the Macdonalds case was a slippery slope, but rather that this was the point at which the cultural paradigm shift could be clearly pinpointed.
 
bchadwick wrote:
Black Swan wrote:
When you read the Warfighting manual (intended for marine officers) you have points it is expressely stated that no technology should ever be implilmeneted and has no role in the marine corp where it limits an officers autonomity to act by reducing his responsibility by overstepping surveilance through the chain of command. I found this dumbfounding, because in an organization known for it’s rigid control (from the outside) you have a completly different picture from within where they truly get leadership and responsibility (in theory). They also go on to elaborate that mistakes when leading will happen, but should be encouraged as leadership entails risk. You never see these concepts in the private sector despite an overall lower level of real risk. And this is what has died with the advent of technology.
Click to expand...
I wasn’t dumbfounded, but I was impressed. However, one does have to keep in mind that the real organization may not behave as much the way the books say it should (like markets).
But I liked the explicit idea that someone who took action, even if it turned out badly was considered better than someone who sat there because they were waiting for orders.
They also said that one could decide to sit and wait pending more information, but that that had to be an active decision to gather specfic information or have some kind of trigger point for action, rather than passively hoping to have more come in.
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It’s interesting, but again, just feel like the broader point I was making was entirely missed.
 
Calm, calm, my a-little-too-sensitive friend. I’m not contradicting your points, I’m adding more context around them.
And my slippery slope of a slippery slope, was just a play on words for amusement, not a bashing of your thinking.
 
A few ideas:
Instead of taking the shotgun approach and sending out a ton of so-so applications to every opening that seems somewhat desirable, focus on a smaller set but try to nail them. Modify your cover letter/CV so that it aligns with what’s being looked for in the job description for that particular role (obviously don’t make up stuff, but emphasize the right things). And don’t be afraid to network/reach out! Through old coworkers/LinkedIn/just emailing someone at the company…I’d personally be a bit flattered if someone emailed me about a job with our firm - lots of employees get referal bonuses as well, so they would have a clear incentive to introduce you to a hiring manager if you can convince them you’ve got potential.
Expand your idea of what you’re looking for. Don’t be afraid to join smaller shops/start-ups/companies outside your original preconception of where you should work. Convince them that you can be useful!
Tons of people are making money these days by providing real value to others through internet resources. Can you provide similar value through your background by creating a website or online training? What about offering your consulting services? Try to get people to endorse you on LinkedIn if you take this approach.
Finally, you could try going back to school for something like MFE…probably not the ideal choice, but it could get you back on track.
 
bchadwick wrote:
Calm, calm, my a-little-too-sensitive friend. I’m not contradicting your points, I’m adding more context around them.
And my slippery slope of a slippery slope, was just a play on words for amusement, not a bashing of your thinking.
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The first post was attempting to argue against legalistic thinking as a root cause, but I thought somehow differentiating case law from legislature was an empty point to make and didn’t detract from the initial statement.
 
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