I want you to engage in a little thought experiment with me. Think back to the time when you applied to college or graduate school. Now think about those essays you wrote, earnestly explaining to the admissions officers how you needed to obtain a degree from their university. If you were like me, chances are pretty good that your essays were filled with visions of social justice, civil rights, helping the poor or serving the public good in some other quantifiable way. Chances are not good that you wrote something along the lines of, “I need to attend your university so that, immediately upon graduation, I can work for a huge corporation and make tons of money.”
Good news from the boardroom this week. A new study concluded that Fortune 500 companies with more women on their boards perform better financially than companies with fewer female directors. The study, The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards, was conducted by the non-profit organization Catalyst, which works to expand opportunities for women in business. It found that, although women only occupy 14.6% of seats on the board of directors of Fortune 500 companies, they have a major impact on a company’s financial success.
Yes. There are endless free lunches, dinners and drinks if you do the conference circuit.
Are trade shows and conferences really worth going to? Every day there seems to an invitation in my inbox to be somewhere.
Last week the SIBOS show hit Boston. SIBOS is to men in financial technology what Christmas is to the rest of us. Gifts and drunk people.
Squeezy stress balls, free cocktail vouchers, karaoke hosted by Norwegian or Swedish banks. All in the name of straight through processing, clearing and settlement and all things IT for finance.
The topics discussed at SIBOS are not really life changing at all, but people in the office are ready to poison their co- worker’s coffee to make sure they get a spot.
The best thing about it is that it’s a traveling circus so some years you can get a really good vacation out of it. Sydney, Singapore, San Francisco and Stockholm have all been memorable. People have had to take many sick days after to recover from the jetlag and the booze.
Did Boston deliver the SIBOS experience? If you went, let me know who won the karaoke contest.
The Intrepid Woman Explorer series is designed to bring our readers a close-up and personal view of some activities and elements of business culture that have been historically male-dominated.
So I thought, what better way to kick off the series than a review of my recent dining experience at Peter Luger’s, the legendary Brooklyn steakhouse that has defined the experience of power lunches and expense account dinners in New York for over 120 years.
Contributed by Jessica Titlebaum
Last year around this time, I was in bad shape and desperately needed a nice long break from work. My feet were killing me from wearing heels for the past two years. Most nights, I was snoring in the my cubicle loud enough for my boss to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go home. I was exhausted, work was overwhelming and my vacation time was calling my name…
Getting a job at an investment bank or corporate law firm can be super competitive, even if you have all of the right credentials to get your foot in the door. So it’s important to have every possible advantage when you are going through the job search, application and interview process.
To that end, I sat down with a top headhunter from a national recruiting firm and a director of recruiting at a large corporate firm and talked to them about some common mistakes that candidates make and ways that candidates have impressed them.
Based on their experience and my own, here are ten tips that should improve your chances of landing your dream job:
Three times in the last week, I have had the same déjà vu-inducing experience. First, when I was helping a client prepare a high-tech conference speech, second, when writing an article about dark pools of liquidity in the European equity trading landscape (welcome to my world), and finally, while listening to a friend bemoan her ineffective interdepartmental meetings. My friend perfectly summed up the common thread in these experiences: “How are we supposed get anything done if we can’t understand a word anyone says?”
Just thinking back on my conversation with this guy makes me cringe. A couple of weeks ago, one of my co-workers gave me the contact name of a friend of hers, and suggested I interview him for an article I was writing. I called him up to let him know that I was going to be in his neighborhood, and to ask him if he would like to meet up and discuss his views.
In general, these informational interview calls go pretty well – either people are able to meet with you and are pleased at your interest, or they’re too busy so they politely decline. Oh no, not this guy. He made it clear that I was wasting his time, and used such a rude and obnoxious tone with me that you would have thought I was a telemarketer calling him in the middle of his Sunday night dinner.