Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs & hedge funds will not hire you with these words on your CV. Top hedge fund manager plays rock & roll piano but doesn’t read
Are you meticulous? Did you play a significant role in shaping your university finance society? Can you make robust models of ever-evolving corporate transactions? Do you delve into the intricacies of company accounts?
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If so, it might be a good idea to buy a thesaurus before writing your application to banks like Goldman Sachs or popular hedge funds. The words and phrases above are best avoided. Bloomberg says they are the stereotypical vernacular associated with CVs (resumes) written by Large Language Models. And recruiters of junior bankers and beyond are getting kind of sick of being spammed with the output of ChatGPT and similar.
Based on the information provided, it is important to consider (oh dear, this is harder to avoid than you’d think) what the issue is, and why financial employers are so hostile to AI applications. Banks want candidates with potential to reach the highest levels of success, but who are capable of maintaining the perfectionist attention to detail that’s needed for the early years of “pls fix”. It is hard to appear outstanding when you’re using the same language model as millions of others. It's also hard when you come across as somebody who’s prepared to take risks with the known tendency of these models to “hallucinate” and make errors.
These errors can be subtle and easy to miss in proofreading. One recruiter notes that she’s seen a rash of CVs in which candidates who spent time on the “Industrials” group of an investment bank instead claim to have been on the “Industrial Group”, for example. "Industrials" is common in banking, but hardly ever seen in the rest of the model’s training data.
Even apart from the errors, there’s a feeling in the industry that it’s a disrespectful thing to do. As Brianne Sterling of recruitment firm Selby Jennings puts it, “If this person didn’t bother to take the time to build a resume, why would I take the time reviewing it and interviewing them?”
Of course, a cynical candidate might answer something like “you probably won’t”. Banks have been using AI screening tools on graduate applications for far longer than ChatGPT has existed. They're even more likely to do so now that ChatGPT-generated CVs means a hedge fund job gets 300+ applications.
So we can probably look forward to a future in which candidates pretend to write resumes and recruiters pretend to read them. And in which the jobs are awarded through a combination of nepo, grades, diversity goals where legally permitted and luck, just as they used to be. In that world, the only useful advice might be to remember that when you’re asked a question at the interview, don’t respond to it by immediately saying “Certainly!”.
Elsewhere, is it fun to be one of the richest hedge fund managers in the world? Not according to Paul Singer of Elliott Management. Unlike some other activist investors, he’s never gone about the craft with brio, writing the kind of invective-filled letters that Dan Loeb made famous. Singer’s letters are distinctly more lugubrious, addressed to investors and describing all the disaster scenarios he’s been considering while managing their money. As he says, “If I want to be risk-averse, I have to be risk-averse all the time”.
Fun, in this world, is what you do in your spare time, with the money you made by constantly focusing on never losing money. And once the computer is shut down, Singer apparently gets a bit less risk-averse – he skis, sails, snowmobiles and plays keyboards “in a couple of bands”.
But he doesn’t read books any more. According to a recent interview, he used to be a big science fiction fan, but global markets have become so complicated that he no longer has time to read anything but geopolitics and economics. When the market starts getting in the way of his music, maybe he’ll consider retiring.
Meanwhile…
A former Goldman Sachs banker who now runs a $10bn sovereign wealth fund and attends all the best conferences; Vladimir Putin’s special envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, has something close to the ideal hedge fund lifestyle, although he probably has to be quite a bit less risk-averse than Paul Singer. (FT)
Once upon a time, junior bankers with too much spare time could make a profitable side-hustle by booking and flipping hard-to-get tables at popular Manhattan restaurants. This is now, sadly being regulated out of existence with a new state law against third-party reservation apps. (NY Post)
It’s not just banking – lots of other industries are also experiencing the curious phenomenon of a “frozen” market where there are few layoffs, but nobody’s quitting and so nobody’s hiring. Although overall unemployment is low, it’s incredibly frustrating for people who are trying to get their foot in the door. (Atlantic)
At the Goldman Sachs campus in Dallas you can take advantage of a low cost of living, meet senior executives from all the main divisions, get involved in deals and see the Mavericks play as a perk. Just don’t ever mention the book “Liar’s Poker” or the phrase “Equities in Dallas”. (Business Insider)
Back in 2002, Scott Paterson was investigated for insider dealing by the Ontario Securities Commission. More than twenty years later, he is still incredibly salty about it, and at a few executives at one of his former employers who he thinks encouraged the regulators. The Canadian court system seems to mainly believe that it’s too far in the past to be litigating now. (Investment Executive)
A slightly unusual move, not only from buy to sell side, but from ECM advisory to a hedge fund. Alex Abagian, former co-head of APAC equity capital markets at Morgan Stanley, is going to the Sydney office of Ghisallo Capital. (Bloomberg)
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