More people want to work at Goldman Sachs than live in these six countries
If you thought the market for jobs at top institutions was tough, take a moment to consider the prospects of any young student with hopes and dreams of working at Goldman Sachs.
New figures reveal that an astonishing quarter of a million students have applied to the top investment bank for a position. And that's just this year alone.
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Yep, 250,000 ambitious young people are pitting their wits against each other for the lucrative positions (of which there are naturally far fewer ) – that's a group of people bigger than the populations of some entire countries.
To put that in context, it's bigger than the population of island nations such as Saint Lucia and the Seychelles, and closer to home, Jersey and the Isle of Man.
The data, uncovered by the FT, shows there were 223,849 applications for undergraduate summer jobs and positions for new analysts, while 30,542 were MBAs looking for a summer job or new associate position.
Roughly the same number of people apply to work at Goldman that live in Plymouth, Rotherham or Stoke-on-Trent.
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As if the sheer numbers of people after a job with Goldman were not enough, it's worth pointing out that the bank employed just 36,800 according to the most recent data for 2015. That's nearly seven times as many graduate's wanting to work there, than staff who actually do.
In addition to countries, those wannabe Goldman employees are the size of many an entire company's workforce, and in fact are slightly bigger than the total staff of JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.
That's certainly some tough competition.