Research for Contact Process

Before you contact your target companies, you need to do some research about them. You have two main goals:

1. You want to find information about their analyst program or career opportunities, such as who to contact.

2. You want to find specific information that you can use to make a connection between the company and yourself.

Ideally, you should have a filing cabinet of hanging folders to hold literature and research on each company. Organizing your efforts now will help a lot when you are juggling interviews and contacts with several investment banks.

There are various levels of research needed throughout your job search process. They range from finding some general information about companies and their markets for when you are first contacting the companies to finding specific strategies, problems, and numbers for when you are interviewing. Researching for interviews is found in a
different section of this web site.

The firm's web site is the best source of current information about the investment bank and its analyst program. S&P and Value Line reports are somewhat useful if you cannot find a web site for the company. The UA Career Center and Bruno Business Library have both of these reports.

One of the most important purposes of research is to determine if this firm sounds like one with which you would like to be associated. Granted, you should probably not be getting ahead of yourself and "turning down" too many firms before you even fire off your first resume, but it is important to be mutually attracted to one another. In addition, your time and resources are limited so you will need to prioritize your efforts.

You should gather the following information for inclusion in each target firm's folder:

• Contact information for recruiting

• Details about the analyst program

• Summary financials of the firm

• Company focus summary and uniqueness summary

• Two or three deals in your interest area (find news about these deals and information about the companies involved by using their web sites and brochures on their analyst programs)

• Wall Street Journal articles and other publication articles about the company

NOTE: Be sure to read the Wall Street Journal each day so you can catch articles about investment banks or articles of interest to the investment banking industry. The Wall Street Journal has a company index which lists the page numbers of any articles that cite a particular company.