“Everyone has a right to apply,” says Derek Walker, head of graduate recruitment at Barclays Capital. “If you pass our selection tests, your CV will be judged according to exactly the same criteria as everyone else’s.”

It’s a view echoed across the City. “We invite everyone to complete on line tests before we screen application forms so it’s a level playing field,” says Vivienne Bradley, head of European campus recruiting at Merrill Lynch. “ We do look at your educational results however this is only one aspect of many that we consider when screening application forms – We wouldn’t exclude you because of your school.”

Statistics suggest otherwise

Sometimes, however, actions speak louder than words. For all their claims to receive candidates from any school with open arms, most banks hire between 70% and 88% of analyst (graduate hires) from target universities and more than 85% MBA hires from a select list of top business schools.

Few banks are willing to publicly identify the universities they target, but they typically include the likes of Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, the London School of Economics, the French Grandes Écoles, and Bocconi in Italy. Favoured business schools include the London Business School, INSEAD and leading US insitutions like Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, and Chicago.

Calum Forrest, head of European resourcing at Goldman Sachs, said the bank would be unlikely to recruit someone from a fourth or fifth tier university, but is very interested in applicants from the second tier: "We're interested in universities with a deep bench of talent, but recognise that the top 5-10% of students at numerous universities could be very successful here," he says..

The rationale for focusing hiring efforts at top tier institutions is unashamedly commercial: this is where the marketing buck is best spent. “We can’t go to every single university and business school in Western Europe,” says Walker, “We need to define a universe of target schools where we have either had a strong history of success, or there is a disproportionately large pool of people who are likely to meet our requirements.”

Push harder

Where does this leave students at untested institutions? Needing to prove themselves, is the answer.

Banking recruiters are in agreement that if you attend a school that’s off their radar screen, you’ll need to work twice as hard to get onto it.

“You need to be proactive,” says Sallyann Birchall, head of European graduate recruitment at Deutsche Bank. “Use your head, find out who are the right people to talk to, call people in the business, contact alumni from your university already working in banking.”

“You need to hunt me down,” says a graduate recruiter at a rival bank who requested her name remain anonymous, “If you call me and demonstrate you’re interested in a career with us, I may be able to introduce you to a few people. There are normally a few candidates each year that I help out like this.”

Forrest says applicants from second tier institutions also need to work hard gathering information on banking careers and the financial markets: “If you don’t go to the career presentations we make at target schools, you may be disadvantaged in terms of information flow. You can compensate for this by reading the press, looking at our website and leveraging any contacts you have with the firm.”

He also advises students at non-targeted schools to attend careers fairs that aren't specific to particular universities. Goldman Sachs, for example, is often present at the AISEC careers fairs. -

See http://www.careersfairs.org/module/student/fairs/browse, for more information.