Finance & Consulting
Scroll through the blog posts and stories below to learn more about Hamilton student and alumni experiences in this industry, and then use our check out our links to various resources on the right side of the page. Finally, meet with your career advisor and explore the Career Center curriculum to learn how to network with alumni to discuss your interests and learn more about their work.
Finance & Consulting Blog
Searching for Careers in Marketing: Expanding your Skillset Q&A
By Ted Nehrbas '15
November 25, 2020
Tags Finance & Consulting
What was your job search and experience like at Hamilton?
My hunt for post-grad employment didn’t begin until the winter of my senior year. From my experience running The Continental Magazine and co-resurrecting The WAG, I knew I liked marketing and content creation. I began applying to relevant positions indiscriminately, and in the process, realized I might lack some of the “hard” skills recruiters like to see (I was an English major with an aversion to numbers and Microsoft Excel). I applied to the Tuck Business Bridge Program at Dartmouth in an attempt to balance my skill set. That spring, I got an offer from Happie, a tech startup in Boston, as a marketing intern. I was also accepted into the program at Tuck. I decided to do both, and so I spent the month of June studying managerial economics, accounting, and corporate finance in Hanover before “shipping up to Boston.”
How did you narrow down your choices to the HR/marketing side of business?
I got into marketing because it’s creative, rapidly evolving, and good for “people people” (I’m a people person). I got into the recruiting side of marketing because my first job out of college was for a recruiting software company, Happie. I learned about the industry as I learned about Happie’s product. My internship was a nightmare, but I took my newfound knowledge and trauma and began looking for new marketing gigs in Boston. I landed at another startup, SmashFly, which created recruiting marketing software. I was their recruiting marketing specialist, charged with finding digital ways to attract and engage sales and tech talent. Startups are volatile, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when SmashFly laid off a handsome chunk of its employees in a single day (including me). I got a massage and moved on, but maintained my interest in the recruiting niche of marketing.
What are your main responsibilities at Bain? How is your Hamilton education/network playing into that?
My primary responsibility is to use social media to continually establish Bain as the best place to work for our ideal job candidates. I manage our global Instagram, Facebook,and YouTube accounts, run paid advertisements and advise the owners of our global social media pages. The main way Hamilton helped me is by instilling in me a high standard for written English. When your firm is known for perfectionism, one small grammatical error or typo in a social media post can spark an internet troll feeding frenzy. I would be eaten alive if I hadn’t spent four years at Hamilton getting utterly roasted by our English faculty.
How can students at Hamilton use their time best to be more "marketable" on the job market?
It’s not always best to take the “direct” route into consulting. If you rely too heavily on your GPA or test scores, you’re going to get lost in a towering stack of resumes. Develop your natural interests, even if they don’t seem expressly related to your dream career. Your story and unique perspective are your most important selling points because recruiters are human and make decisions emotionally.
