Everyone wanted to hire Qiushuang Zhang. Before she earned her Master's degree in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in May, Zhang had two job offers from Goldman Sachs, two from Microsoft and one from Google.
"Goldman says I can make lots of money."
"Goldman says I can make lots of money," said Zhang, a native of Harbin, China, who wears bright purple glasses and spent last summer writing video game software for Electronic Arts.
Zhang asked for advice from a Chinese friend who once worked at Goldman and is now at a San Francisco-based hedge fund.
The woman agreed that writing software for Goldman's option traders in New York would be thrilling, Zhang said.
Then she confided that she could not sleep at night because of work stress. "Life is different if you focus too much on money," Zhang said.
Starting at Google
She starts at Google this month.
Wall Street and Silicon Valley are courting Zhang and graduates like her - those with top marks, finance and maths skills and a couple of languages - more heavily than any students since the days of the 1990s dotcom explosion.
With the surge in mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts and hedge fund investing, US securities firms are struggling to fill all of the empty spots at their investment banks, in trading rooms and on quantitative finance desks.
Employment in financial services grew 37 percent to 830 000 people in the 10 years that ended in 2006, according to the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association, an industry lobbying group.
"You have to get the technology part right because that's become the guts of the organisation."
"It's ferocious," said Connie Thanasoulis, Merrill Lynch's director of campus recruiting. "You have to get the technology part right because that's become the guts of the organisation."
The students they are fighting for are members of the generation born from 1982 to 2002 - Generation Y, or the Millennials.
They needed to be approached differently from previous graduating classes, said William Strauss, a marketing consultant and co-author with Neil Howe of the book, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.
Strauss explained that this generation's parents had often scripted their lives from kindergarten to college. They had faced intense competition in school and many had been so busy burnishing their CVs that they had never held a paying job.
"They aren't as experienced with the notion of getting to work on time or other elements of workplace etiquette," he said. "You can hear them coming in their flip-flops."
"Our hiring issues are a high-class problem," said Janet Raiffa, the head of US campus recruiting for Goldman Sachs. "The students we want are the same ones that everyone else wants."
Nowhere are the recruiting wars more fiercely fought than for those who can write the algorithms used in computer-based trading or search engines.
To fill maths-intensive jobs, banks are bringing in more non-US employees - people like Zhang, who came to the US to study. They typically started out in countries such as China or India, which have traditionally been more focused on maths and science education.
Banks are adding engineering schools to the roster of business campuses where they recruit.
The banks are also trying to woo younger students - often preferring undergraduates to those with a Master's in business administration (MBA).
With these students, the Internet is as basic a tool as pen and paper to them. The Millennials were smarter than their bosses were at the same age, Strauss said.
Most do not see themselves working at their current job for more than a year or two. Having grown up watching their Baby Boomer parents struggle to juggle careers and family, they are not willing to sign on for a life of 80-hour working weeks.
Image and hours
"Google has a very sexy image," Raiffa admitted. "There is a coolness on Wall Street, but it's a much more corporate environment."
Zhang agreed. "Goldman's current package is not enough to compete with West Coast information technology companies," she said.
Flexible hours are standard issue at Google. So are a host of other perks on offer. Workers can play pool or ride scooters from one area to another. They get three free meals a day, la"You can hear them coming in their flip-flops."undry and gym facilities and receive a free massage on their birthday.
Zhang said Google would give her $5 000 (R34 500) towards the purchase of a hybrid vehicle.
Google is the number one place where both US undergraduates and MBA students want to work, according to a poll by Universum Communications in Philadelphia. Goldman is the third choice for MBAs, behind McKinsey & Co.
Bank recruiters can still offer the same perk that has always brought people to Wall Street: money. Undergraduates in investment banking or information technology typically get a $60 000 salary, plus a year-end bonus that starts at about $10 000 and, for some first-year bankers, could reach $80 000 or more.
And Wall Street earnings can soar above $1-million with time. The average pay at Goldman Sachs was $622 000 last year
Study debt
For a sizeable slice of the Millennials, money is critical. They were graduating with more debt than any generation before them, Strauss said.
Tuition, room and board at private US colleges is climbing towards the $50 000-a-year mark. "They look with despair on things like buying a home," Strauss said.
Even Zhang was not making any promises about the future. She said that ever since she was in high school in Harbin, she had dreamed of living in the US and working on the most advanced technology.
"It's like you're running at the front end of this age," she said.
When she starts at Google, Zhang wants to learn more about the company's so-called underground teams - those working on secret projects that cannot be discussed with her until she officially starts her job.
In a couple of years, Zhang thinks she might move back to China and go into business for herself.
Her widowed mother, a former school principal, lives there, and Zhang is her only child.
That is one plan, at any rate. Like other sought-after Millennials, Zhang can always change her mind. - Bloomberg
This article first appeared in the Business Report.