Episode 124: How to get a graduate job in the city

January 2, 2022 Podcast

For the 124th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast, I speak with author and former investment analyst Dermot Dorgan on how to get a graduate job in the City. In this fun episode, Dermot shares his 10 commandments for exactly what you need to do to secure your dream graduate role in banking, finance, and accounting in the ultra-competitive City of London.  We explore why you should get a 2:1 or go home, why you shouldn’t expect to rely on your ability as you apply for graduate jobs in the City, and why you might want to think again if you are planning on doing a master’s degree. We also explore why all work experience is so important, and how being ‘human’ can become a key differentiator through the interview process. Having worked in the City himself, Dermot has been there, seen it and got the t-shirt, and his insight will help you no matter what type of company you are applying to. Now the links to the show notes today including a full transcript you can download and links to everything we discuss can be found at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/city.

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • Dermot’s 10 commandments for getting a graduate job in the City of London
  • Why it is so important to get a 2:1 degree
  • How preparation beat’s ability through the graduate application process
  • Why you might want to think again if you are planning on doing a master’s degree
  • The secret to making your work experience pack a punch
  • How being ‘human’ could be your key differentiator in a graduate job interview

SELECTED LINKS INCLUDE:

Episode 124: How to get a graduate job in the city

Announcer: Welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, your home for weekly information and inspiration to help you get the graduate job of your dreams.

James: Hello and welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, with your host James Curran. The Graduate Job Podcast is your home for all things related to helping you on your journey to finding that amazing job. Each episode I bring together the best minds in the industry, speaking to leading authors, graduate recruiters and career coaches who bring decades of experience into a byte size show. Put simply, this is the show I wish I had when I graduated.

Hello and happy new year to you with this episode going out on the 1st of January 2022. I have a very special episode for you today. Now as host of the UKs number 1 careers podcast I receive lots of careers books to read from people wanting to come on the show, and occasionally I receive a book which blows me away, and today I have a treat for you, as it is one of those examples, of a careers book which when I read it I was going through agreeing with everything it said, and wishing that I had written it myself. The book in question is the Leveraged Careers Guide to Graduate Applications, A step by step guide to landing your first job in the city, by the brilliant Dermot Dorgan. Dermot joins me on the show today and takes us through his ace book, sharing his knowledge on how to get a graduate job in the city, and having worked for the big 4 and in asset management, he gives practical and actionable advice as he has been there, done it, got the t-shirt and also learned the hard way about what works, what doesn’t work, and what he looked for when he was recruiting graduates like yourself. In the show we explore Dermot’s 10 commandments of what you need to do to get a graduate job in the city, including why getting a 2.1 is so absolutely vital, why you might want to think again if you are planning on doing a masters, why being a DJ might be the differentiator when it comes to impressing in an interview, and why having your heart set on only 1 job is never a good idea. It’s a really fun episode, Dermot is a superstar and I know you are going to love it. Now the only link you need to remember from today is www.graduatejobpodcast.com/city where you can find a full transcript, and links to everything which we discuss, that’s www.graduatejobpodcast.com/city.

This episode is going out on the 1st of January and we are moving into the business end of the graduate application cycle, video interviews are coming thick and fast, if you are doing well the assessment centres will be following very soon and hopefully those offers will start flooding in. This is when you need to start taking it seriously, and it’s not the time to start leaving things to chance. If you want to ensure you are in the best possible shape ahead of interviews, assessment centres, group exercises, role plays, whatever it might be, get in touch. I offer one-on-one coaching, I’m also running mock group exercises over the coming months so you can practice those in a group setting, and if you really want to get ready, there is my flagship How to Get a Graduate Job course, which it is never too late, or to too early to sign up to. You wouldn’t have a driving test without having lessons before hand, so why would you want to take a recorded video interview or go to an assessment centre without getting practice in? You get one shot to impress, so get in touch at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/coaching and see how I can help. You will be glad you did, but be quick though, as I only have a limited number of slots and they are filling up quickly. That’s www.graduatejobpodcast.com/coaching. Right, with that said, let’s jump in to my chat with Dermot.

James Curran: I am very excited to welcome to the show all the way from Dublin, a man of many talents, author, investment analyst, and keen cocktail maker, Dermot Dorgan. Welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.

Dermot Dorgan: Thanks for the introduction, James. Great to be here.

James: I have to say, I get sent many books to read from people interested in coming on the show, and your book, The Leveraged Careers Guide to Graduate Applications: A step by step guide to landing your first job in the city, is one of my favourites, and definitely one of the best and it is one of the most practical. You can really tell that you’ve been through the process and are writing this from first-hand knowledge. Today, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through the book in a bit of detail. Listeners, show notes from today, you can find over on the website at graduatejobpodcast.com/city. Before we get into the book then, Dermot, do you want to give listeners a quick potted history of your career and how you came to write the book?

Dermot: I’ll keep this short, because there’s many times like this I just appeared on. I suppose I always had a background in economics or finance. It was kind of the area that I always knew I wanted to go into once I had gotten out of college. I did a degree in economics or finance in UCD, but I had no idea. I made just about every possible mistake you could make while still coming out the other side. I just didn’t have a clue how to go about researching jobs, or what jobs are even out there, what companies were out there. I’d heard a few names of investment banks and hedge funds and stuff. I really had no idea. It was just—it just felt overwhelming, really.

It took me a long time to get my head around that. I didn’t graduate with a job offer. I did a Master’s. I was doing the Master’s, applying for more jobs again, and it’s just rejection after rejection. It’s hard when you’re in that position, and you just don’t know, “What am I doing wrong?” You know you’re doing something wrong, and you know there’s a right way of doing it, but it’s just there was nothing to fill that gap for me. Like you said in the introduction, it was trial and error, and it was a lot of errors for a long time. And that process of me learning, me eventually getting to the point where I had a graduate offer from KPMG in London.

Talking to other students who were in a very similar position, I think, coming from Ireland, it was even more pronounced, because we just don’t have that much knowledge. Say, my background, I’m more interested in the City of London in finance, investment, that kind of stuff. We just don’t have very much information about that at all. Graduate programs, we’re catching up with it now, but back in 2005-2010, no one had a clue. Certainly, the career service in UCD wasn’t the most useful.

This whole process of setting up the website and setting up the blog, and writing the book was I just had accumulated so much knowledge from making so many mistakes, and I wanted to pass it on. I want to help people avoid the same mistakes that I made. You’ve probably got similar background, similar story yourself. You know where I’m coming from on this one.

That data ended up being a blog, and it became an eBook as well. When I was in the workplace, I got involved with graduate recruitment as well, and you could see people were still making the same mistakes that I made. When I realized that, I thought, “Okay, I’ve got something I can offer here. I’ve got experiences that could be valuable to other people.” That isn’t really being catered to right now. I just tried to fill the gap, and that’s what I’ve done with the blog and with the book, and hopefully with this conversation today.

James: Excellent. Links to the blog and to the book, as I mentioned, you can find in the show notes, graduatejobpodcast.com/city. Yeah, really similar background for me when I got in a graduate scheme and then got involved helping out with the graduate recruitment is just I was surprised at the mistakes that people were making. They were really basic mistakes that were just getting people in the rejection pile and thinking—surely, people know not to do these things, but the answer was no.

Why the podcast was born was to help to share information, and to get good careers advice out there so people don’t make the mistakes that I saw so many candidates make. I guess it’s similar thoughts from both of us. I like the dedication that you have to begin the book. This book is dedicated to the no-hopers, “I was once one of you. Your time will come.”

Dermot: I thought about taking that out. That was literally how I felt. If there’s anybody else who’s feeling the same way, who’s like when you feel like I know I can do this. I don’t know exactly what it is, and I don’t know what’s standing in the way between me and it, but I know I can do this. It’s like it’s that feeling of knowing that you have enough, but at the same time that there’s just that bit that’s missing. I wanted to say to people who feel like they’re in that position and feel frustrated by something that they don’t quite understand, or they can’t quite get their head around, or they see other people succeeding where they aren’t. Patience, it’s out there. Your time will come. As long as you’ve got the right principles, and you keep just chipping away at it, you’ll get there. That’s what I’m trying to get across.

James: I completely agree, and one of the saddest things is when you see really good candidates who just quit, that just give up. They just think getting a graduate job while getting on a graduate scheme is too difficult. I’m just going to settle. You can see the wasted talent with settling for things that they don’t have to settle for if they just keep on plugging on, if they keep on improving. If you keep on improving and you don’t quit, then you’re always going to get there in the end.

Dermot: Yeah, I think it was something that’s, again, very relevant in Ireland especially because going over to UK to get a job just kind of seems intimidating, especially the City of London with all the pinstripes and the ego, and the money, and all this. For a lot of people, I think, especially the smarter kids in Ireland in the better degree courses, they’ve always got an easy out. They can always go because of their university. It’s a little bit like Oxford, Cambridge is in the UK. If you got Oxford or Cambridge on your CV, you’re always going to get an interview.

The same thing in Dublin. If you got UCD or Trinity, certain degrees on your CV, you can always get a job in KPMG, Deloitte, one of the Big 4, one of the professional services firms. That’s there for you on a plate pretty much. Whereas what I’m trying to get across to people, the smarter kids in Dublin is like, “Look, there’s a whole world out there, and it’s totally there for you and you totally are smart enough. You just need to do a bit of preparation. Don’t be scared of it. Don’t be intimidated by it. It’s there. You just got to get through the work, and you’ll get the results at the end of it.”

James: Definitely. As the book’s title suggests, it’s a step-by-step guide to getting a job in the city. Unfortunately, due to time constraints today, we’re not going to be able to fit in all of the book. What we are going to go over are your 10 commandments for a getting a job in the city. Before we get into the note, do you want to maybe start with where the 10 commandments came from? As in, your 10 commandments, not the original 10 commandments.

Dermot: Same place. It’s an interesting thing with blogs. I think anybody who sets up a blog starts off blogging about knitting, or cooking, or graduate careers, or something like that. The blog content eventually, over a while, it goes from being this real niche subject to kind of going a little bit deeper and deeper. It’s almost like any blog where you’ve got someone who just kind of keeps drilling away at their thing. It ends up becoming more like a blog about philosophy or about life than it is about the thing that it was originally about.

And the 10 commandments kind of came from that when I started seeing the kind of underlying principles, or the recurring themes in graduate hiring that just kept coming back. If the rest of the book is about all those little details of how you can make sure you’re always on time for an interview, or how to answer a competency question, or all that kind of stuff, that’s the kind of nitty-gritty, but then, when you look underneath that, that’s where I started realizing there was more and more of these principles.

At the end of it, I was thinking about them, and I actually pretty much had 10 on the dot. I didn’t make up an extra two or three. I didn’t cut any more so it wouldn’t be the 12 commandments. It literally was 10. I thought, “Wow. If it’s 10, then they have 10 commandments.” I don’t want to put too much pressure on people. These aren’t “commandments” and such, but it was just an easy way for me to build a narrative around it. That’s what they came from, and they’re kind of principles, guidance. I guess kind of look back, think back to the 10 commandments or these 10 principles, and they might be able to guide you if you’re stuck.

James: Definitely. Let’s go through them each in turn. Let’s start with number one: get to one or go home. Nice and blunt for a commandment—

Dermot: It’s really bit harsh. I know, isn’t it?

James: Why is the “to one” just so crucial?

Dermot: First of all, I’m coming at this from the perspective of mostly of the City of London. Of all the graduate jobs that I’ve seen advertised, I could fit one hand, the number of jobs back that either demanded at first, or that was okay with a 2:2. It’s literally everything, 99-point whatever percent of the jobs I’ve seen, it’s just a 2:1. A 2:1 is like one of your passing grades or your entry point. Now, you’ve done a podcast yourself on what to do if you get a 2:2 or lower, and it’s not like your life is over at that point, but I do want to get it across. I don’t want to make it seem fatalistic, but yeah, in terms of your grades, and for the vast majority of grad programs, it’s going to be a 2:1. Just think of that as your passing grade in university.

Do whatever you need to do to get a 2:1. Guarantee the 2:1. At first, you’re not going to impress too many people really. Don’t do it for the ego. Don’t put all your time into it, because you just want to be able to say you got a first, or you came top of your class. That stuff doesn’t really matter so much. It’s almost a negative in a way. If I see someone with a CV who’s trying to impress me because they came top of their class, I just think, “Yeah, you probably should have put your time into other parts of your university experience.” There’s two sides. On the one hand, the 2:1 is really important. On the other hand, getting a first is no big deal. Don’t stress over it.

James: I completely agree. A few of the people who’ve bought my online course, “How to Get a Graduate Job”, are current students in their final year who are applying for graduate schemes at the moment, and my key message to them has been it’s great that you’re getting applications in, almost see it as a practice run-through, but make sure you don’t take your eye off the ball, and be applying for jobs at the detriment of your degree. Make sure you get that 2:1, because as you said, if you don’t get the 2:1, it just makes your life so much harder.

From speaking to recruiters, they know there’s no discernible benefit in terms of getting people who have a 2:1 over a 2:2. It’s just literally a numbers thing. It just cuts down the number of applications, which is what they’re trying to do at the early stages, because they just get so many. There’s got to be some arbitrary mark, and they just go for people who’ve got a 2:1. Make sure you get one, but make sure it’s the key thing you need to be taking out of uni.

Dermot: Yeah. I think in UCD, in my old university, they’re getting better with that. A lot of the lecturers are telling the students like, “Look, don’t obsess about your grades.” Especially, my course is quite mathematical, and so mathematical people are used to getting like 100 percents on tests a lot of the time. They naturally go for that again. They tried to be the best. They tried to be the smartest on it. It’s detrimental. We’re kind of at the other stage where we’re trying to encourage people to see graduate applications as like their extra module that they’re doing, and spend more time on that and less time on the study, but yeah, totally share the experience.

James: Let’s go on then to commandment number two, which is, “Any work experience is better than not.” I like how you say that if getting 2:1 is half the battle, having work experience is the next 30%. Why is work experience so important then, Dermot?

Dermot: Well, first of all, you can take this out of this graduate context. When someone has work experience on their CV, that means that some other professional organization found this person to have at least enough ability and credentials, and whatever else to be offered a job that they were able to hold that job then for a period of time, and that they were able to just function in a professional environment.

When you’re taking on people who are 21, 22 years old, you know very little about them. Even with the graduate process, the reason the graduate application process is so comprehensive, and advanced, and exhaustive is to address that problem that like you really don’t know who you’re hiring. You’ve got a CV and you talk to someone for 20 minutes, it doesn’t really give you a massive idea of what that person is like.

The fact that somebody else has found this person tolerable enough, it’s just that alone that this person can function in a professional environment, that counts for something. That really does count for something. The other side of it, or another side of it is that the more competitive a job is, the more requirements, the more demands are on you, and the more they’re going to want people who can hit the ground running, and people who can add value from the start. The more experience you have, the more work experience you have, the more relevant it is to the role that you’re now applying for, all the better.

But literally, if you’re applying for jobs as I was, and this is part of the reason that I got rejected over and over and over again, because I was graduating without any internship, any placement, any work experience in a professional environment at all, and that was just such a huge barrier for me to overcome. It was only towards the end that I started realizing, “Okay, this is why I was getting all those rejections.”

When you think about your time in university, we’ve talked about the 2:1 and how that’s like half the battle. Getting work experience, getting the right kind of work experience is kind of most of the rest, really. There’s kind of two aspects to it. One, it shows that you are capable of turning up on time in appropriate clothing, having showers. We’re hiring young adults, old kids, people on the boundary. The more risks that you can avoid, that you can prevent, the better.

James: I completely agree. I do find, though, that with some graduates they do get- as you said, work experience is great, but people just get hung up that unless they’ve got work experience at the UN, shadowing the Secretary General, or they’re not working at Downing Street or something, or Goldman Sachs that their work experience isn’t valid. That’s not true. As Dermot said it, work experience as well is what you make it. It doesn’t have to be some high shiny name on the CV. If you can get that, that’s great. But if you can’t, it doesn’t matter. It’s showing that you’ve got the nails to get the job, and then the nails to keep the job is going to stand you in good stead, and then it’s thinking about the skills and experience and the stories that you’ve developed that you’re able to tell in the competency answers you’re going to be giving. That’s what’s important, and you can get that from working in a corner shop, just as well as you can photocopying on an internship for an investment bank. Don’t get hung up on exactly the name of the company that you’re working for. Do you think that’s fair, Dermot?

Dermot: Yeah, absolutely. Even just working in a bank behind the desk, that’s experience. That’s something. That counts for something. Like you said, having the nails, having the gumption to just go out there and get yourself a job, that counts for something. I think people can become too focused on the academic side of the university experience and the academic side of getting jobs, but you’ve really got to push yourself out there, get out of your comfort zone, go send your crappy CV to some company and take it from there.

You’re going to be making mistakes at this age. Nothing’s going to be perfect. Just accept it and try and make the best out of it. It’s like the first rung on the ladder. It’s the first step. You’re not going to be perfect at this point, so don’t beat yourself up for it, and don’t give yourself goals and targets that are just going to be a rod to beat yourself with.

James: I completely agree. Commandment number three is, “Work experience is better than a Master’s.” One of the things I’m often asked is, should I do a Master’s? I always think that there’s probably better uses of 30 grand, and the year of your time than doing a Master’s. I mean, Dermot, what are your thoughts about recruiting people into finance when you saw they had a Master’s degree?

Dermot: I don’t think that, in a way, like our hiring process, we had certain skills and traits that we were looking for. As long as the individual displayed those skills and traits, that was good enough for us. I was in KPMG at the start, and then I moved to a smaller company after that, and that smaller company was much more focused. We had more flexibility, and we were able to get to drill down to what we want. From our perspective, whether they had a Master’s, whether they had more work experience kind of almost didn’t matter to us so much.

But what I would say at a Master’s is that I think you have to be honest with yourself about why you want to do that Master’s, and one reason could be that you’re moving from let’s say you did engineering, and you come to the end of your engineering degree and you think, “I’d like to actually work in finance.” And you think, “I’ll do a Master’s in quantitative finance,” or something like that. That seems like a reasonable reason to do it. The counterpoint to that is, well, you can still get a job in finance. They’re doing a Master’s in finance. People from finance hires people from every background. I’ve worked with people from classics and biochemistry, and history, and mathematics, and whatever else. “Do you really need that Master’s?” is what I’d ask.

I think it takes a certain amount of maturity to think, “What is my real reason for doing this Master’s?” I think a lot of people, part of it comes down to that they’re not really ready to go into the workplace, they think maybe if they get really good grades on the Master’s, then that will make it easier to get a job. Or they didn’t get the jobs that they wanted, so they’re going to take another year out to do a masters and then apply again. There’s a lot scenarios where on the one hand, you think, “Okay, that’s a good reason to do a Master’s,” but then on the other hand, it’s like you’re saying, “If you’re spending 20-30 grand on a Master’s for something that isn’t going to massively—” I’m saying this as someone who’s recruited people, and I’ve just said it, whether you got a Master’s or not, it doesn’t really matter. It’s like I’m looking for, “Do you have the characteristics in you that you can add value in my organization?” I don’t think that the HR people who filter the CVs before they get me, they’re not going to be extra impressed by someone just because they have a Master’s. They did a degree in economics, and now they got a Master’s in economics or whatever else.

As I say in the book, really, ultimately, the only thing that makes—I don’t want to give people who have just signed up for a Master’s make them feel like crap. Unless it’s like a real brand name, I hate to say it, because I have a Master’s, but I don’t have a brand name Master’s. My Master’s has got experience for me overall, but if I’m really— was it worth the money that was spent on it? I don’t know. But the thing that really makes a difference is, is it a brand name? I hate to say it, but it’s like are you doing a Master’s in Finance in Cambridge, is it a Master’s in whatever else, in the LSE, or Oxford? Those things make a difference.

But apart from that, if you’re thinking if you’re graduating at the end of your degree, and you don’t have a graduate program lined up, and you’re thinking about a Master’s, I’d put forward into possibly other options. Explore absolutely every option and really only commit to a Master’s if you’re absolutely sure it’s the right thing for you to do.

James: Yeah, and my thinking is you could use that money and put it towards trying to get work experience. Whether that’s unpaid work experience, or just work experience somewhere else, whether it’s in the UK, whether you’re putting it towards your accommodation costs, or if you can get work experience elsewhere around the world, you don’t have to settle for just working in the UK. You could look to spend your money to get the work experience, and that would be more impressive on your CV.

If you can get something that’s really practical and really relevant to the job you’re applying to, it will probably give you more queued off through the application process. But as you said, it’s about having a really good think and not just going to it as, “Oh, I can’t get a job, so I’ll just do a Master’s.” That’s going to really help me, because, as you said, it’s probably not going to, and it’s going to saddle you with additional costs.

Dermot: Yeah, that’s absolutely another way you can look at it and say, “Well, it’s going to cost you X grand, what else could you do with that money?” What else could you do that would get you a step closer to where you want to be? That’s a good perspective to have on it.

James: Let’s move on then to commandment number four, which is, “The gap is the process of elimination.” Do you want to take us through this, Dermot, and maybe explain what the gap is?

Dermot: The gap. I just got tired of writing graduate application process over and over again in the book, so I just shrunk it down to the gap. A process of elimination, I think it helps to frame how you think about how you approach each stage of this process. As you talked about before with the 2:1, a lot of what happens at the early stage of graduate applications is just a filtering job. It is literally they have got thousands of CVs. These graduate recruiters in the Big 4 and the BP and the whatever elses. They’ve just got so many CVs that they have to get through, so many applications. They have to find some way of filtering them. They can’t give all of them their full attention. There just aren’t enough hours in a day.

The early stages of the graduate application process is really just about filtering out the, I guess, people who are at that time the no-hopers, at that point, who either don’t have a 2:1 or they haven’t filled out all the, say, motivational questions in the online application or they filled them out badly, or whatever it is. They just need clear, simple rules that they can use just to whittle the field down, and one of them is going to be a 2:1, another might be the psychometrics test. Some employers, they’ll get your online application, they’ll put you straight through the psychometrics. It takes a while.

You think you’ve done a great job and you’ve earned your place in the next round, but it turns out, no, they just put everybody through. Past that, you may fail it, but for them, it’s quicker. They’re like, “Well, if I can filter like two-thirds of the field through the psychometrics, why not just put them straight through and then we can start filtering all the other CVs after that?”

The more that they can automate the process and just make it the system that is doing the work for them, the better. Then when it gets to the telephone interview, or a video interview where someone’s time from the business is actually required to think about, “Does this person have the potential? Are they ticking the right boxes? Do I like them?” yada, yada. You want to make sure that when you’re an employer, you don’t want to be spending money on that too soon. You want to make sure that when your time is actually being allocated to it that the people that you’re giving this time are worth it.

It starts off very much as a process of elimination. One of the key things to take out of that is don’t think you can do an amazing CV that’s going to get you an interview, or a cover letter that’s going to blow them out of the water. Don’t try and be special. Don’t try and wow them. You don’t need that wow factor. That’s the kind of generic career consultants always tell you about. You just want to be absolutely tick the box, make it easy as possible for whoever the poor soul is that’s got a pile of CVs and applications beside them can just tick, tick, tick, good, into the next round. That’s the early stage. Later on, it becomes much more about you, but in the early stages, it’s a numbers game.

James: Completely. As you mentioned with the CV, they’ll tell you nice and clear what they’re looking for. If they specify that they want a 2:1, then make sure you’re making it nice and clear on your CV that you’ve got a 2:1. If they say that you need a C and above, GCSE for English and Maths, then make sure you’re putting that. If they say you need a finance degree, then make sure you’re highlighting that you’ve got a finance degree, or whatever it might be. They tell you what you want, so just make it easy as possible for the person reviewing your CV to put you through to the next stage.

As you mentioned, the trend is that the online testing stages is earlier in the process now. It used to be you’d review all the CVs, and then the people that have got through would then go through the online stage. As you said, they’re putting people through. As soon as you submit your CV, boom, you’ll get an invitation to complete the numerical tests or the psychometric tests, and you’ve got three days’ notice. It doesn’t matter how good your CV is if you’re going to then fail the psychometric testing stage.

You need to make sure that you’re practicing before you start submitting your CV, because if you’re waiting to start practicing until you get the invite, and you’ve got three days to cram all your practice in, then it’s going to be a push, so make sure you’re doing the practice in tandem with submitting your CV as well, otherwise it’s going to be getting difficult.

But as you said, these early stages are just about getting people out of the process, and then as you get through the assessment centre, flips around 180, and it’s about getting you into the process, so getting people into the business. But up to that stage it’s just about how many people they can get rid of as quickly and as easily as possible for them.

Dermot: Yeah, it’s a numbers game for them, and it’s got to be a numbers game for you too at that stage. There’s an element of just even if you’re not entirely sure whether you want this job or not, you’ve got to just put as many CVs, as many applications out there, and then take it from there, see what you get back.

James: Definitely. Commandment number five, let’s move on to that one, which is, “Preparation beats ability.” Now, I completely agree with this. Good preparation always beats natural ability every time. You can really see this with people who might have straight As or might have a first. As we talked about earlier, they’ve got nothing else on their CV, and they just think that the grades are going to carry them through or maybe the fact that they got a first from Oxford or Cambridge, or wherever it might be is going to be enough, and they don’t have to bother putting the work in. But in my experience, candidates just underestimate just how difficult and competitive the process is going to be, and also how much companies value extracurricular stuff as opposed to just a degree. What are your thoughts on that, Dermot?

Dermot: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny. Just as you were talking there because it reminded me of a friend of mine. He was working as an accountant in, I think, KPMG actually, and he wanted to get into finance and investments and stuff. He was asking me questions about it. One of the points he brought up was like, “You know me, I’m really smart,” and he gave me a Leaving Cert results in the equivalent of like two or three A stars at A level or whatever. I was just thinking like, “Yeah, man. That’s just not even—if you’re still 21, 22, 23, still trying to live off your school results, you’re not in the right headspace.”

There’s two sides to this. I find it quite uplifting in a way, because no matter how smart you are, and no matter how dumb you may think you are, you can do this. It all comes down to preparation. It takes back a lot of when you were in school, some people are just good at maths, or they’re good at French, or they’re just good at whatever, and they just happen to be good at these things. Well, now life is kind of changing a bit now. It’s much more about how much work you put in, and how much graft and elbow grease you put into it. Like I said, I find that very uplifting.

We’ve talked about competency questions. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. You cannot turn up to an interview and rattle off three or four perfectly-structured competency questions that answer everything that the interviewer wants just on ability. It just doesn’t matter whether you did a Master’s in Cambridge, or PPE in Oxford, or whatever it is, it’s not going to work for you. You’ve got to put into preparation, and I find that it’s quite a positive message.

Remember that if you do put the time into this stuff, you will get the rewards. It will get very tedious filling out application form after application form, but you just got to, I don’t know, switch off that thinking part of your brain and just churn through it, and you will come out the other side. That’s kind of the thing you’re in school, maybe this is the smart kids or the smart kids, but now it’s really all about what you put into it.

I have to say, overall, out of the graduate application process, I think- first of all, it got a lot out of me. The fact that this is all about preparation and the work I did, I started to learn a much better work ethic from going through this process. Also, I think my results were kind of fair. It wasn’t until I really had gotten to the point where I was a kind of competent young adult that I started getting offers. This isn’t something you should be intimidated by. This is, I think, for most people, this should be really good news.

James: Yep, completely, and the playing field is levelled. It’s not about the one grade you got at university, or the A-level of marks you’ve got. It’s more of a holistic view. What are you like face-to-face, what are your interpersonal skills like? How well can you hold a conversation? How interesting are you in terms of the activities that you’ve done? As you said, it’s a positive way to look at it. Talking about preparation, and we talked earlier about the numerical tests, and the psychometric tests, generally. Make sure that you’re practicing, and practice just does make perfect with those.

You just need to put the time in, put the effort in. I’ve got links. I’ll put links in the show notes to some of the good companies that do practice tests where you can just practice a test you’re going to face, and no matter where you start, if you put in practice every day for two weeks, you will be ready for the test you’ll do for the different companies. It’s just about putting in, as you said, the elbow grease, and put in the work.

Dermot: Yeah, definitely. As a rule of thumb, I’ll just say, if you get a psychometric test, you’ve never seen it before, then you’ve done your preparation wrong. You needed to do a bit more prep.

James: Nothing should be a surprise at any stage of the process if you’re putting the preparation in properly. Let’s go to commandment number six, which is, “Get involved.” What do you mean by this one, Dermot?

Dermot: Get involved. It was something that a couple of people when I first moved to London. I was working in KPMG. The guys who did the grade intake before me. It just seems to be a phrase. I don’t know if this is like more of a British phrase or a UK phrase or what. They’d always just say like there’s some opportunity would come along and one of the lads would be like, “Yeah, you should definitely do that, man. Get involved. Get involved, mate. Get involved.” It kind of became this catchphrase, “Get involved.” It’s like do stuff, just literally get involved, whatever you can get involved with, whatever kind of.

I suppose I should use the word “community” now. I think a community is like your sports club is a community. Your workplace is a community. Your neighbourhood is a community. When you’re in university, although sports clubs and societies are all potential communities for you to join, and one of the things you want to show throughout your CV and throughout the process is that you’re the kind of person who’s just generally outgoing, involved, has different communities, adds value in all their communities, that kind of person.

What I’m trying to get across to people is that when you go to university, you’ve got a lot of opportunities to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise, and you have a lot of this kind of this ready-made infrastructure, if you like, community infrastructure there for you to get involved with, and the more you do that- it doesn’t have to be like 20, 30, 40 hours a week. It might just be one club or society that you do a couple of meetings a week, and then maybe there’s a big event in October or November that you’ll organize. That’s your full involvement, and that’s great.

As long as you’re adding value, and you’re working with other people from different backgrounds, and you’re working together on a shared goal, that community that you’re involved with starts to reflect the workplace in a way, especially if it’s in university where you’ve got all these students from different backgrounds and whatnot. And then that [fancy? 0:35:57] you in the application process when you’re talking about your competency questions and stuff like that. It’s kind of a mindset that you carry around with you. If there’s an opportunity to join a community to get involved with some people, to get involved with a project, whatever it is, just get involved.

James: Yeah. I liked your dodgy Cockney accent there as well. That was really impressive.

Dermot: Don’t feel like you have to do an Irish accent there.

James: No, no, no, to end up sounding Welsh.

Dermot: He’s from London anyway. He was a guy that’s from London.

James: I completely agree. We talked earlier about having a first and nothing else in your CV isn’t impressive. Think about what else you can get involved with, because companies, as you mentioned, they want people who work for them who have that mindset, because when you start working on these graduate schemes, there’s going to be lots of different opportunities for you to get involved with, whether it’s helping out with a graduate recruitment, internal events, whatever it might be. There’s going to be lots of things that they want your input with. If you can start demonstrating that you’re the type of person who’s doing that already, it’s going to be a big tick in the box.

Dermot: Yeah. I’d say, actually following up on that in your workplace as well, it’s something to take with you when you’re in a grad program is do kind of put your hand up for all different kinds of work, because that’s the kind of thing that stands you, a year or two down the line, when people are talking about promotions is that, if you’ve been involved in different parts of the business and kind of worked on different kinds of clients and all that kind of stuff, makes it a lot easier to promote you, because you have a broader range of experiences, and you got a better perspective on the company’s business as a whole rather than just being the person who does that one thing, and then you just get stuck with that.

James: When you do get that graduate job, you’ll have the balanced scorecard that you’ll be filling in at the end of the appraisal year where you’re trying to fill in all the different bits. If you can put your hand up early on, then you’ll have more things to put into there. Let’s move on to the commandment number seven then, “From As to alpha.” Can you talk us through this one?

Dermot: Yeah, it kind of builds on the previous point, and it builds on a lot of what we’ve been talking about already is that you’re coming to a stage in your life when you’re—the graduate program, and kind of leaving university and going into the workplace in general.

That period again from like 18-25 is where all your grades, grades, at the end of the day are, I suppose, they do represent some learning that you have some kind of knowledge in your head, but to a large extent, they are proxies for ability. They are rough guides for how smart, or how ambitious, or how hard you work, but that’s all they are. They’re proxies. They’re rough guides. With the graduate process, with your time in university, building on all the stuff we just said about getting involved, you have to take a lot more responsibility for yourself, and you have to be able to point to the difference that you make in your life.

Getting back to my point about communities, you need to be able to show that wherever you’ve gone, whatever community you’ve been a part of, you’ve been able to add value. That community has benefited from you being there. What I call it alpha, like in financial markets, you’ve got alpha and beta, and beta is like the average return of the stock market, and then alpha is the difference between the return of the stock market and the return of the, say, superstar fund manager. Or just anyone who returns above what the market returns.

When I talk about alpha, I’m talking about your personal alpha. What’s the difference that you make? What are the skills that you bring to the table? What are the problems that you can solve? That’s one of the changes is when you go from being a kid to being an adult, to being a proper adult, is when you go from getting by in life out of necessity, based on your grades and these proxies, and people making allowances for your youth to going through a period where people aren’t really going to make allowances for your youth.

You’re not going to get the second chances, and the third chances, fourth chances. It’s really about what you’re able to do in the moment with the opportunities that you’ve been presented with. That’s a huge part of growing up, because growing up doesn’t end at 18, I’ll tell you that. I noticed it certainly in myself and a lot of my friends. It’s much more when you get to your early mid-20s that you really start becoming a young adult, and this is a part of that.

James: Definitely. I really, really love that. Let’s move on then to commandment number eight, which is probably more difficult for some people than you would expect, which is, “Be human.” Can you take us through this one?

Dermot: Yeah, what I found with a lot of CVs and cover letters that I was reading, they switch off quite a lot. I noticed that there’s a lot of, I call it, serious business person speak or something like that. It’s like they try to use those phrases that they think are supposed to be in cover letters, or that are you’re supposed to have in your CV. Like, “I should look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience,” and all this kind of clunky language and stuff.

You just switch off. The amount of time I’m reading a cover letter, and [blows raspberry] I just zone out. It’s 50/50 whether that person goes into one pile and the other, because it’s just like you just can’t even get through it. It never feels like it’s a human being talking to me. I suppose it gets back to the point that we were just making about growing up and being an adult is that being an adult doesn’t always mean using big words, and fancy words and being serious, and making rules, and telling people what to do, and all that kind of stuff. It still is about being a human being and communicating with each other.

The workplace I found, it wasn’t casual, but it was more relaxed, less formal than I expected it to be. Much more reasonable place where people are just communicating a lot more openly and less about being, “I’m just at the bottom, and I have to do what I’m told, and stay out the way,” that kind of thing.

I don’t want to say the more human you can be, the better, because this is still an interview, and there’s formalities here, but the more you can come across like a real human being that is just trying to express themselves and has human faults, it’s okay that your CV or your cover letters aren’t perfect, that’s okay, but that you’re just a young adult trying to make their way in the world, and that you’re trying your best, and you’re open to new experiences, you’re open to new ideas, and you’re keen to get involved, the more that can come through, the better.

I think, slightly related to that, one of the points I made in the book is that, when you’re hiring someone, you’re hiring someone with skills that can do the job that needs to be done. You’re also committing to spending 40+ hours a week with this person for the foreseeable future. If you can’t tolerate them, if you can’t stand that person, you’re going to find- you may not make it as explicit as saying, “I cannot stand this guy,” but you will find other reasons to go with someone else, to go to different candidates. That’s where we’re coming from here.

James: Definitely. When you think about it, from that point of view, whether the recruiter is going to be spending more time with you, or if they’re going to be working with you, they’ll be spending more time with you than the loved ones. You can understand why people recruit people who they want to work with. I liked your example in the book of a friend who was recruiting and had two candidates who were equally qualified.

One of them had been a DJ, and your friend had also been a DJ, and they ended up chatting over the shared connection, and talking about DJing during interview, and then suddenly, it’s no longer an interview. When they’re talking about it, it becomes a conversation between two people who have a shared interest. He ended up offering the job to that candidate not because just of the DJing, but I guess because he saw himself to be able to speak to this person, someone who he’ll be able to sit next to and have banter with, and talk with, and get on with him maybe better than the other candidate. Do you think that’ll be fair?

Dermot: Yeah, exactly. It was just for that it might have only been like 20 seconds, but for that 20 seconds, it didn’t feel like an interview. It probably felt for them that they were just chatting about something that they had a shared interest in. I think it’s a fascinating example of hiring, in a way, because there’s few different perspectives. From another perspective, that’s what it can come down to. What do you say to the other candidates? He was perfect. He did everything right. But for some reason, he’s not getting the job.

They’re not going to tell him that’s why he didn’t get the job, but the reality is that, just through pure chance, pure circumstance, these are the people that hit it off on something, and they were able to just be human beings talking to each other for a minute, and that was enough to make him seem like a better candidate. Now look, the lesson is not to go out and get yourself a set of decks and become a DJ. Don’t try and recreate this in some way, but it also goes back to what we were saying about getting involved. The more you have to yourself, the more you have to your personality, the more likely that these kind of fortuitous circumstances will arise. Don’t panic about that, but it’s like you say. It’s just the fact that they allow themselves to be human for a sec, they could just see each other as colleagues. It just made it easier from there.

James: Yeah, and this could have happened just as equally if you’re into knitting, and just two people chatting about knitting. On your CV, you have often people put hobbies and interests section. If you’ve got the space there, just don’t put, “I like watching TV and I like eating out, or seeing my friends.” If you’re going to put something there, put something that which gives you an opportunity to have that connection with someone. Whether it’s DJing, or knitting, or you run the University Harry Potter Society. Whatever it might be, you never know where you will be able to just build that rapport with someone further down the line. Just be honest about what your passions and interests are, but just make sure you’ve got some passions and interests that you are able to talk about.

Dermot: Yeah, I think that’s it. It’s that if you don’t have something to put there, if your first thought is to put down, “Well, I kind of like eating out.” It’s like, okay, that’s something but maybe spend a bit of time and ask yourself what kind of stuff does interest you? What does get you a bit excited? What would motivate you to get involved in something to give, say, a few hours a week to a particular project or an area? Whatever it is, maybe it’s charity, maybe it’s volunteering, maybe it’s a university society, whatever it is. It’s worth asking yourself, if you struggle to write, to answer questions like that, then maybe you need to spend a bit of time thinking about it and thinking about what does matter to you.

James: Definitely. Two left, number nine then, Dermot, “Don’t have your heart set on one job.” Why is this a recipe for pain?

Dermot: God, yeah. It seems like such clunky language now, and this is why once I finished writing this book, I put it away and I didn’t want to read it again. You just spend so long putting these things together, and then you open the first page, and there’s like a typo or something like that, it would kill you. Anyway, leaving that aside.

First of all, it’s a really common mistake for people 18, 19, 20, 21 to get into their heads, “I just like this one job, and it’s the most perfect. That’s the job. That’s the one I want to do. It’s the perfect status. I love the job so much. It caters to all my skills.” Blah, blah, blah. You may be right, this may be the most single, most perfect job in the world for you, but if you go around with that in your head, it becomes all or nothing. Your happiness, your whole sense of self-worth is going to depend on that, on you getting that job. As we’ve just described, as we’ve just talked about, the difference between getting a job and not getting a job can sometimes come down to the flimsiest roll of the dice, just pure circumstance.

When you build a job like that up in your head, and indeed, this applies to anything in life, like a friendship or relationship, whatever it is, you build this one thing off to be the “be all and end all”, well, you’re putting yourself in a horrible situation. Because it’s you will either “be all or it will end all.” If it’s end all, then that’s going to be crushing for you personally. Your motivation is going to be gone. Your whole sense of identity might be fractured at a sensitive point in your life.

First of all, don’t do that. If you find yourself leaning towards that where your emotions are getting really invested in one job, or one graduate program, or one outcome, row back, take a step back, few deep breaths. The best way to avoid that happening is to have- yeah, great. If that’s your job and that’s your dream, go for it, by all means. Give it thought.

However, have a Plan B, a Plan C, a Plan D, a Plan E, F, G, all the way down to Z, whatever. Because for a number of reasons, one, at least you’re not going to be crushed. Okay, the top one didn’t work, but at least you’re going down to your Plan B and your Plan B was close. Maybe it’s only a 10% fall, and then it’s like another 10% from Plan B to Plan C. When you’ve got that, that was kind of all those safety nets, those backup plans, you’re just naturally going to be in a healthier state of mind, in general.

And in particular, you’re going to be in a healthier state of mind when you go into the interview for your dream job if you know you’ve got plan B, C, and D. That’s such a huge point, and it goes back to a lot of what we’ve been talking about already. But yeah, I’m sure you’ve talked about this a million times with your mentees and through the podcast as well.

James: Yeah, it’s as you said, the pressure thing is a really, really big one. And if you do put yourself under too much pressure, it’s just a lot more difficult to perform. If you know that this is the only job you’ve applied to, and this is the only assessment centre, and everything rides on this one opportunity. There’s a lot of pressure there. But if you know you’ve applied to lots of companies for a start, and you’d be happy taking them all, then again it just makes life more easy and life more manageable. So, don’t put pressure on yourself unnecessarily.

So, let’s then move onto commandment number 10. There’s a nice positive end for number 10, which is you can get from anywhere to anywhere in finance. Can you maybe take us through this one, Dermot?

Dermot: Yeah, I’d say this is probably true in life as well. Getting back to what we were talking about there about not having it hard set on one job. Let’s say you graduate that dream job in whatever it was, you didn’t get it, you’re at your fifth or sixth choice job, and you feel like a loser, and your friends are going off and they got the jobs that they want. Even worse, they got the job that you wanted. That’s awful. That is painful. This is the first step in your career, and I’m just saying you’re barely an adult anyway. Where you start your career does not define the rest of your career.

And these studies that show that if you start your career on this, your career trajectory is in a higher trajectory, and your salary’s on a higher trajectory, and all that kind of stuff, I don’t know about that. I don’t know how good those studies really are, and I don’t know how healthy a lesson that is to be telling people anyway. You can literally get from anywhere to anywhere. You talked before about seeing jobs as not just I went and I worked in this place, and this has such and such a status, and therefore I can turn that into a slightly higher status job, and yada, yada.

It’s all about the skills that you pick up when you’re there, and you could take Big 4 accounting. Okay, you’re learning some accounting skills. You can take those accounting skills. Maybe you wanted to be a big hot-shot hedge fund manager. You can take those accounting skills, and maybe you do CFA Level 1 in your spare time. Now, you can go into work for a fund manager. There’s loads of fund managers out there who want someone to go into equity fund manager or corporate bond fund management. Plenty of massive companies out there, the BlackRocks, the M&Gs, all these guys will hire people who have got their accounting qualifications and maybe have shown a bit of extra gumption to go on that direction themselves.

And then from there, maybe you become a super-star fund manager, and then you go to a hedge fund or whatever. The whole path, the number of different ways that your career can go from this point is just absolutely infinite. Again, getting back to our point about beating yourself up because you didn’t get into that one graduate program that you wanted to get into.

It’s this whole thing about thinking about grades, and ticking boxes, and jumping through hoops, and you have to work out which hoop to jump through, and if you jump through that hoop, then you get to do what you want. It’s not about that at all. Now, it’s much more about you. You’re in a graduate program, wherever it is. First of all, what does this job entail, what can I get good at, what is the overlap between the stuff I’m good at and the stuff I enjoy.

And then after a year or two in that workplace, then you’ll have a much better idea of the options that are available to you for the next step, and you’ll have a much better idea of what you’re good at, what your skills are, and then you can take it from there. In extremist, even if you know for sure that that one job is the one job you wanted or that one industry, and now you’re in something else, and you really don’t like it, you can start applying into graduate programs again as soon as you’ve walked in the door. In one job, you can still be doing graduate applications again, because a lot of them, they’ll take people with up to 24 months of experience.

So, even if you’ve started one graduate program, you’ve done it for a year, you may not like it, you can still apply to other graduate programs. Or, you can take the next step and just go into a job that’s looking for maybe one or two years’ experience. There’s a lot of people who hire entry level people, but at the same time require some work experience. There’s a lot more grey areas out there for you to explore once you’ve got into a graduate program.

So, it really comes down to how much you actually want that job that you think you want or how much you learn, how much you take from the job that you’re in at the moment, and how you can translate that into something else. It’s really all about you and what you make it at that point.

James: Definitely, and it’s about focus. And if you really want it, there’s plenty of different ways, as you said, to get it. I remember back when I was working for a management consultancy. There was a lady there who really wanted to be a consultant coming into the graduate scheme. So, she got a role working for the firm in resourcing. So, in resourcing, you’re responsible for where the consultants were placed. So, in that role though, you were speaking every day with the senior consultants. You were speaking with them and their staffing needs for their different projects. She got rolled in that, showed how great she was, really impressed, and then just made the lateral move internally because she’d built those relationships with really senior people, then she just transitioned across and got a job as a consultant, and them boom, she was away.

Look at are there other ways you can get in? Are there maybe more junior roles you can take? And then, again, impress and show people what you can do, and then you can move internally to the role that’s the one that you think is perfect for you. So, if you keep going, if you keep learning, if you keep pushing yourself and you never give up, then you’ll get there in the end. It’s just a fact of life.

Dermot: I could add other stories as well that I’ve seen from my friends who have started off who really wanted to do. One guy who really wanted to do M&A. He wanted to be an M&A banker when we were in college together, and he ended up just going into accounting in, I think, it was probably KPMG in Dublin. Then, he went to Morgan Stanley’s finance departments.

So, he’s doing back office stuff for Morgan Stanley, and then he somehow managed to, either through his own bit of networking while also being generally competent at his job, he managed to finagle an opportunity to get into the Morgan Stanley graduate M&A team, and he was coming in as an analyst. He was 27, 28, 29 at the time, and there he was, finally seven, eight years later, he had finally got that dream job.

Do you think he gave a toss whether he has to go through KPMG or the back office or anything else? No. Once you get there, the path doesn’t matter at all. You’re not going to care at all. You’re happy as Larry at that point.

James: And skill-wise, he would have had amazing wealth of skills, which probably meant he was one of the highest people in that team because he had his accounting qualification, he had the back-office experience that other people would have. So, then once he was in, he probably progressed quickly through the ranks just because he was more skilled and had the experience that other people don’t have.

Dermot: Yeah, and more maturity, and that’s something that I encourage to the extent that I can is encourage people to take a bit more time at this period in your life. You don’t need to get into a graduate program at 21. And indeed, if you take a little bit longer to go through college and you spend a bit more time getting experiences, doing a work placement, maybe taking a year out after college and doing something useful with that time, being a bit older, first of all it’ll help you get through the grad process for sure. And then even when you join the workplace, just being a year or two older gives you a bit more maturity and it makes it easier to get the first promotion or whatever it is after that. You’ll notice it. You’ll notice your maturity.

James: Let’s finish with a nice thing you said at the end of the book. Getting an offer isn’t easy, but it is doable. And that’s completely true. The secret to graduate jobs is in the title. They’re looking for graduates, and they have the jobs. So, it’s a dream match. If you’re a graduate and you’ve got a 2:1 or whatever qualifications they need, then they’re looking for you and they have the jobs available. So, don’t let this put you off. It is doable. You just need to put the work in, put the preparation in, work hard, and you will get there in the end.

Dermot: Absolutely.

James: So, Dermot it’s been a longer episode than normal. I’ve kept you over our allotted, so let’s finish with some weekly staple questions. I’ll be interested for your responses here. So, question number 1, what one book would you recommend to our listeners?

Dermot: I’ll try to keep this quick. I just had to be different, but I try to pick something that hasn’t been done before. I’m going to recommend an empty book. It’s a diary. An A5, one page per day diary for you to write down your homework, your assignments, your lectures, your reminders. Anything that you need to remember, write it down in that book.

I got my first diary when I was in second year or third year in college, and I have had a one year, one page per day diary every year since then. I’m 35 now, so I don’t know. You guys do the math. I literally don’t know how I would function as a human being without that diary. The sooner you get one, the sooner your life will- you’ll have more control, more power over your life. It’s such a huge productivity tool.

James: So, we’re up to, this’ll be episode 110 or 111, depending when it goes live, and this is the first recommendation where someone has recommended a diary, and I can’t believe it’s taken that long. Amazing recommendation. I 100% agree. Having one place where you can store all your thoughts, and actions, and things you need to do will massively, massively increase your productivity. So, Dermot a cracking recommendation there. So, you set the bar high. Question number 2, what one website would you recommend that listeners check out?

Dermot: Have you heard of Cal Newport, the author?

James: Yes.

Dermot: He recently had a blog called studyhacks.com, which I wish I had found when I was in college because it really would have helped. I’m a terrible studier. I’m marginally less terrible today than I was before, but I’m still pretty bad at it, note-taker, all that kind of thing. He’s got a blog that gives you much more up-to-date studying, note-taking, memorizing, all that kind of stuff that you have to do in college, essay writing, all that kind of stuff.

He’s in his 30s as well, much more modern approach to it. If you’re in college now, you’re going to find that blog- it’s actually called calnewport.com now, but it used to be Study Hacks. The reason it’s calnewport.com now is that his whole area has moved on from just how to be a straight-A student, which is one of the books he’s written into just work in general. He covers how to be more effective, how to be more efficient at work, how to focus better, and he’s written quite a few books on that. The one that I read, I think it was called leveragedcareers.com, and there is a contact page there. We’re in COVID times at the moment. I would love to, when this is done, get back to London, back working over there. And from there, I’d love to go to universities and just talk to people. There’s a book there, and I hope people buy it. I put a lot of work into it, it’s definitely worth the 20 quid that it’ll cost you, even if you chip in with your mates, a 5 or 10 each, I guarantee there is definitely 20 quid’s worth of value in there. Actually, it’s 20 euros, so it’s a little bit cheaper for your British audience.

But if you go on the website, there’s a contact page, and if you feel like you’ve got a group of mates in your university or whatever, or you’d just like a chat, or you need some advice, whatever it is, get in contact. I’d much prefer the talking side of this job, and actually getting a chance to speak to people, and answer their questions, and know that I’ve made a difference there rather than you put up another blog, and you know it’s good and you hope it helps. But I’d much rather have that human contact. So, get on leveragedcareers.com, get on the contact page, read the blogs, and give me a shout.

James: Dermot, thank you so much for appearing on the Graduate Job Podcast.

Dermot: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Many thanks to Dermot, wasn’t that a great episode. I absolutely loved his book and it is well worth investing in a copy of it. It is packed chock full of great advice which will pay itself back many times over. Links to it can be found in the shownotes at www.Graduatejobpodcast.com/city, as I said at the beginning of the show, I get sent a lot of careers books from people who want to come on the show and this is one of my absolute favourites. So make sure you get a copy.

Now no matter where you are on your job search I am here and able to help, whether it is one off one-on-one coaching to get prepped for an assessment centre, or intensive coaching, or practice mock group exercises, through to my flagship Howtogetagraduatejob.com online course, I have something for you. Getting a graduate job is so much easier if you aren’t struggling by yourself, I’ve helped coach hundreds of people to get the graduate job of their dreams, and I’ll be able to do the same for you, so check out graduatejobpodcast.com/city where you can find links to my coaching, the online course and how you can book on upcoming mock group exercises. Don’t be a stranger and get in touch. And also, a final request from me if you’ve enjoyed the show today, please can you like and leave me a review where ever you downloaded it. It helps to keep me high the ranking and for people to find the show, and I’ll be forever grateful. So that is everything for this week. I’ve got lots of great episodes lined up, starting with graduate recruiter Inspiring Interns who will be joining me next week. It’s a goodie. I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly, I hope you use it, and apply it. See you next week!