Introducing www.AnalystPool.com — A better way for college students to break into finance and consulting

Campus recruiting for finance and consulting is really hard…

One of the most challenging things I did in college — more difficult and stressful than coursework, becoming a teaching assistant or losing the 15 pounds I put on after freshman year — was campus recruiting for finance and consulting. Some people compare it to a full time job and if you’re roughly one of four juniors or seniors at a top college or university in America, it’s probably all you’ll be able to think about this fall. I know this because I went through it 3 years in a row at Brown University and while studying abroad at Oxford. I ran in an anxious panic to more than my share of networking events. It started raining before a Goldman Sachs information session my sophomore year and I showed up wearing a garbage bag since I’d worn my suit to a class beforehand and didn’t have an umbrella to shield me from the rain as I hurried across campus.

Unless you’re the rare pro-networker, the events themselves are terribly awkward once you get inside. You frequently find yourself boxed into a huddle of 8 or 10 kids trying to ask a question and — if all goes right — get the business card of the one company rep speaking with your group.

Sometimes there are exclusive networking events you had no idea happened until afterwards.

And then there are the hours spent on the campus job board dropping your resume for different positions and hoping for an interview. The alumni network helps as well — anyone who can get your resume that much closer to an HR rep.

But the thing is, firms want to meet you just as badly…

As much as it feels like the firms have all the power, they desperately want to meet you too. By the time I was a senior at Brown, I was very active on campus as an economics peer adviser, teaching assistant and president of the economics honors society. I had also completed internships at Morgan Stanley, a hedge fund in Hong Kong, a venture capital firm in Singapore, the White House, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. I received emails from firms asking to be connected with students and fielded regular requests from students in the peer advising program to be connected with firms. It didn’t make any sense why there wasn’t one platform where students across the country could connect with employers in finance and consulting. This was especially puzzling given how important getting these jobs is to students and how critical it is that firms make high quality hires.

And so we built AnalystPool…

I graduated from Brown in 2015 and turned down offers from Morgan Stanley and BlackRock to work at the White House on the economic team where I covered foreign economic activity at the Council of Economic Advisers. Creating a platform to revolutionize campus recruiting for finance and consulting was always on my mind though and I left the White House and teamed up with an excellent developer (Ammar Hattab) in the spring of 2016 to build it.

Today, we’re launching the platform for students at a select group of 33 U.S. colleges and universities. It’s free to use and takes less than 5 minutes to join. You just have to upload your resume and photo and fill out a short questionnaire regarding your interests.

We’ve been signing up employers across both industries including top ranked consulting firms and elite hedge funds and private equity firms and will open up access for them in mid-September. Employers can view a demo video on our site at:

Where do we go from here…

We aim to get every student at a top college in America seeking a position in finance or consulting on AnalystPool. Students will be able to learn about the different parts of both industries and engage with employers actively recruiting interns and entry level hires.

AnalystPool will be the first resource finance and consulting firms use to fill a position. Firms will be less reliant on campus visits which cost thousands of dollars per school and are already irrational for many smaller firms. And job postings which only reach fragmented pockets of the talent pool and turn up at least one unqualified applicant for every qualified one will become much less important.

Overtime, AnalystPool will leverage its data to facilitate even better matches so more students end up at jobs they love. We’ll also expand into MBA recruiting and experienced hires where inefficiencies are just as ripe.

Join us…

If you’re an undergraduate at a school where AnalystPool is available, you can sign up today at www.analystpool.com

If you just want to stay up to date on our journey or receive recruiting tips, you can follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/analystpool

We look forward to having you on board!

Bill Weber
Founder @ www.analystpool.com