S.G. Cowen Case

S.G. Cowen is a diversified financial services firm originated in 1998 when Société générale purchased Cowen and Company. Kim Fannebresque, CEO of S.G. Cowen, wants the firm to grow but to remain an emerging growth investment bank. In order for the firm to achieve its goals, a vital role is played by Chip Rae, director of recruiting at S.G. Cowen. Rae is responsible for the selection of 30 business associates to join the firm in the coming year. Half of the associates were already hired from the summer associate program and third year analysts; therefore only 15 offers would have been made after the hiring process. Rae’s hiring strategy was to send Cowen’s representatives to each of the core business schools to give a presentation about the firm and subsequently conduct first round interviews in order to select the best candidates to invite at the last stage of the recruiting process: the Super Saturday event. At the Super Saturday were invited 30 candidates, as a consequence Rae had commandeered 30 bankers to attend the event as interviewers. Every candidate had to go through five half-hour interviews with short breaks in between. At the end of the day Rae gathered the bankers to reach the final decisions.

I had a bad recruiting experience myself. In the summer 2009 I was one of the organizers of a summer camp for kids up to 12 years old. One of my duties, together with the other organizers, was to select the staff of animators for the entire season. The problem was that the majority of the candidates were friends of at least one of us. Since only few candidates had previous experience in the role, we had to base our decisions mostly on personal characteristics. Of course, each organizer favored his/her friends and we spent a long time arguing about who to hire. At the end, we were forced to make anonymous votes. Not everybody agreed to the final decision but it was the only way we could end the arguing. From this experience I learned the difficulties in hiring decisions, especially if it is a joint decision.

S.G. Cowen’s hiring criteria focus on both background and personal factors. In fact, apart the education and experience needed for the position, Rae wants the bankers to focus on whether the candidate