It's 17% harder to get an internship at JPMorgan than Goldman Sachs
If you’re a student interested in an investment banking career, you’ll want an internship – ideally, a summer internship. If you want to apply to Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan, you’ll have to fight of a Roman centuria to get in, centurion and all.
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The Financial Times says Goldman Sachs hired 3,000 interns this year and that JPMorgan hired 4,000. For these roles they received 315k and 493k applications, respectively.
That means 105 students and graduates applied to each Goldman internship and 123 applied to each JPM one. That's huge - and not that it’s a competition or anything, but the implication is also that JPMorgan's internship program is 17% more difficult to get into than Goldman's.
Frustratingly for aspiring bankers, the competition seems to be getting tougher. The FT also reported that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have cut their 2024 intern cohorts by 200 and 600 roles respectively (falls of around 7% and 10%) versus last year, and that the number of applicants has risen dramatically. JPMorgan’s 493k applicants were an 82% increase on last year, according to senior executive Mary Callahan Erdoes.
Although Goldman and JPM are an extreme case, applications across the industry are on the rise. The FT noted that one student sent out 70 applications, which only translated to one interview and one offer for the student. That tracks with our own research: data from Trackr, formerly the Bristol Tracker, suggested that students interested in banking made an average of 68 job applications in the 2023-2024 recruitment season.
Next year’s numbers might lead to some sweaty brows if the trend continues. According to High Fliers’ 2023 graduate market hiring report, there were 39 applications per graduate vacancy in 2022; banking and finance specifically had 59 applicants per graduate vacancy.
Trackr said 57% of applicants to banking internships last year didn’t receive any offer at all last year. With the vast increase in applicants, that number might very well go up – especially if banks continue to cut roles.
It's not any easier to get into the bank as an established professional, either. Goldman, for example, had 300 applicants per open position across the firm, at all levels.
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